13 Octobre 1945 : The Vancouver Sun

EACH Friday night, some forty or fifty drunks—and not amateur drunks, but thorough-going, accomplished, professional, post-graduate drunks—meet in Vancouver in what is the strangest and in many ways the most extraordinary club in the city.
They have been doing it since last January, when the 'club' membership was only a bare half dozen. Now each Friday sees two or three new members join this alcoholic fraternity.

We call them drunks because they cheerfully, even triumphantly, call themselves drunks. The only qualification necessary is to point out that for the time being they are sober drunks, sober—after long years of chronic inebriation—because of one fact; they have found an escape and a way out of drinking.

They constitute the Vancouver branch of a now famous organization known as Alcoholics Anonymous. They meet in a large and spacious home opened to them by the kindness of an interested and generous Vancouver citizen—not himself an alcoholic—who has been for months past one of the keenest supporters of A.A., seeing in that movement a potential solution to one of the gravest social problems of modern civilization.

WHERE MEDICAL science has, by itself, almost if not completely failed in any really effective treatment of the chronic alcoholic, the Alcoholics Anonymous technique has in ten years so proved its worth that it is now acknowledged by such bodies as the American Medical Association as a most valuable discovery. Hundreds of doctors and psychiatrists in the United States and Canada now recommend membership in A.A. to their alcoholic patients as an infinitely more hopeful therapy than the older methods of long-term hospitalization or isolation.

Alcoholics Anonymous is not a religious sect. It is not a money-making racket. It has no formal membership, no initiation, no fees. It is a free association of people who demand no qualifications except sincerity in the desire to be rid of drinking, no state of mind save the acknowledgement that alcohol has one licked and that one is willing to do something about it in fellowship with others fighting the same battle and with the same experience of hopeless effort at "using one's will power" to do it alone.

They realize as a fundamental that "will power" for the alcoholic is a snare and a delusion. The alcoholic's will, they know, is defective and inadequate. Something more is needed. They believe they have found that something.

ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS, since written up in hundreds of magazines and newspaper feature stories across this continent, started in Akron, Ohio, in 1935. The founders were a New York doctor—in Akron on a bender; and an Ohio stockbroker, who met and determined to help each other and then others back to sobriety by following a rule incorporated in what is now known as "The 12 Steps."

A.A. has now a membership of about 28,000, with branches in many large and some small cities and towns. Canadian branches exist in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, Windsor, London, Toronto and Montreal. Other branches are springing up almost monthly.

In the United States large-scale recognition has been won by A.A. groups both from medicine and the law courts. Magistrates there frequently put chronic drunks on probation to the nearest A.A. group; many hospitals give A.A. members visiting privileges to alcoholic wards similar to those allowed doctors.

A striking statement was made some time ago by the chief psychiatrist of the Philadelphia General Hospital: "The alcoholics we get here," he said, "are mostly those who cannot afford private treatment, and this (the A.A. method) is by far the greatest thing we have ever been able to do for them. We observe a profound change in personality in them. You would hardly recognize them, even those who occasionally land back after a slip."

FOR AN A.A. member nothing is too much trouble to help another fellow. If you're having one of those awful nights—or days—when it seems you can't last another half hour without a drink, when post-alcoholic depression has got you down and the toll of your drunken acts is adding up, phone an A.A. member and he, with perhaps another member, will be around to see you in no time at all.
He may even bring you a drink if you really need it. Then he'll make you see that things aren't really as bad as they seem; he'll convince you that others have been through the same thing; he'll get you started uphill once more—this time not alone, or with nagging relations or threatening employers, but with the help and comradeship of those who know all about it, having been through the mill.

They will make you see, too, not all at once but gradually, that the alcoholic is not a normal person, even when sober, but a person with a personality defect, a person who has both a psychological and physical allergy to alcohol.

Other people, normal people, can drink and stop. For such the A.A.'s have no word of criticism; they are not prohibitionists. But for the alcoholic, they have learned, the first drink is never the last. It starts a chain that the drinker cannot by himself break until he is down and out.

HERE IN Vancouver, as elsewhere, the A.A. membership constiuutes [sic] a cross-section of society. Men and women—women are just as susceptible as men—of every walk of life. In the local group are businessmen, lawyers, doctors, a former clergyman, miners, lumbermen, machinists, taxi drivers, laborers, society women, nurses, working girls.

They all have a past. They make no bones about admitting it—now that it is really a past. A past full of benders and binges, of knock-me-outs and pick-me-ups, of jitters and hangovers, police courts and paraldehyde. A long record of failures and lost jobs and broken homes and broken hearts. Now that is past—for some a past of a week or ten days; for others a past of ten months or two or three years.

A.A.'s never claim a "cure." Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic—so far as potentiality is concerned. But they do claim a "permanent reprieve" so far as alcoholic drinks are concerned, a reprieve that lasts so long as the member lives up to the A.A. program. It is like a diabetic. So long as he takes his "insulin" he is safe—but still a diabetic.

THE GROUP insists on anonymity as being the best way to help, knowing the sensitiveness of the alcoholic. But they are not hard to get in touch with, and in most cities (including here) have a post office box through which those interested may reach them by mail.
And knowing the special temptation of great occasions, A.A.'s take precautions. Here plans are already underway for big parties at Christmas and New Years with all kinds of fun—except the kind that comes in a bottle.