individuals and their families, and provide information about effective community-based interventions such as Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has been around for more than 75 years. The biggest controversy about AA is if it is effective or not. Some people find AA to be an effective aid to sobriety; others find AA to be damaging and can lead to increased drinking. AA meetings are groups of people with the desire to quit drinking that help one another achieve and maintain sobriety. These meetings may include readings from the Big Book, sharing stories, discussing the traditions and 12 steps, and celebrating members’ sobriety. Because AA is anonymous, many people feel that participating in a study would be a breach …show more content…
A “drug-free society” has never existed, and probably will never exist, regardless of the many drug laws in place. Over the past 100 years, the government has made numerous efforts to control access to certain drugs that are too dangerous or too likely to produce dependence. Many refer to the development of drug laws as a “war on drugs,” because of the vast growth of expenditures and wide range of drugs now controlled. The concept of a “war on drugs” reflects the perspective that some drugs are evil and war must be conducted against the substances …show more content…
The biggest question people ask is if the “war on drugs” was successful. According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), “The goals of the program are to reduce illicit drug use, manufacturing and trafficking, drug-related crime and violence, and drug-related health consequences.” The best way to measure the effectiveness of the “war on drugs” is to focus on these basic questions; Is drug use down? Is crime down? and Are drugs less available? Since 1988, drug use by individuals ages 12 and over has remained stable according to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (NHSDA). The number of individuals reporting any drug use has increased by approximately 7 million and the number of those who reported drug use in previous months or previous years has remained unchanged. The Organization Monitoring the Future studies drug use, access to drugs, and perspectives towards drugs of junior and senior high school students nationwide. Results of a study conducted in 2005 showed a minor decline in substance abuse by older teens, but drug use among eighth graders stopped remained the same. However, the changes were not statistically significant and ultimately there was no reduction in substance abuse among young students. Crime in the United States has decreased significantly since 1993, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. On the other hand,
Coming into the substance abuse meeting the student nurse was scared and nervous. She was scared of the reaction of the consumers and feared all the stereotypes she heard about typical alcoholics. Innervison gave the student nurse a new outlook on these types of consumers. She no longer looked at them as people who were just drunks and wanted to use AA as an excuse to make it seem like they are getting help. She never really looked at alcoholism as a true addiction; it seemed like more of an excuse to escape life’s problems. Sitting in and listening to these consumers gave the student nurse a dose of reality. The student nurse now understands alcoholism better and AA helped her realize recovery is truly a process that takes one day and one step at a time.
Before I attended an AA meeting, I did not realize the significance of AA and the twelve-step program. Now I understand how these group meetings were designed to influence an individual to remain sober, but also it was meant to use your voice and ask for help when needed. I was glad that I had the opportunity to attend an AA meeting because I was able to see first hand an alcoholic’s point of view. It helped me understand that the negative stereotype of an alcoholic is not true and that because of their disease, they are living in a world that they cannot mentally comprehend because of their inability to refrain from drinking.
This supports the conservative’s claim that the war on drugs is not making any progress to stop the supply of drugs coming into America. Conservative writer for the magazine National Review, William Buckley, shows his outrage towards the Council on Crime in America for their lack of motivation to change the drug policies that are ineffective. Buckley asks, “If 1.35 million drug users were arrested in 1994, how many drug users were not arrested? The Council informs us that there are more than 4 million casual users of cocaine” (70). Buckley goes on to discuss in the article, “Misfire on Drug Policy,” how the laws set up by the Council were meant to decrease the number of drug users, not increase the number of violators.
Alcoholism is as prevalent in my family, as blood is in our veins. When previously asked to observe 12-step groups, I ritualistically flocked to Alcoholics Anonymous, without consideration of the possibility that other groups had any potential to make an impact on me. I always pride myself in my ability to identify as an individual that is not ensnared in alcoholism, but unfortunately am an individual that was highly tormented by alcoholism. Through observation of the group and how it processed, as well as identifying how I felt as a new attendee, I was able to understand why self-help, support groups are so vital for individuals in recovery. I finally realized, I too am in recovery.
AA’s founder Bill Wilson asserted that alcoholism is a spiritual disease with only one cure., AA believes that the one and only cure is by following, and living by the 12 step program. Alcohol Anonymous 12-step program derived from this type of thinking and from the very beginning, new members are taught that they are absolutely powerless to alcohol, and that the only way for you to be cured is for “a power greater than yourself could restore you to sanity”. AA members separate themselves from the rest of society, and attribute their drinking problems to every other aspect of their lives. There is a list of contributing factors to an individual’s disease, published by Bill Wilson. The list is roughly 25 aspects of every alcoholic’s life but Alcohol is never listed because in Mr. Wilson’s eyes it’s not the alcohol that is the problem. Instead it is the individual that has become a victim to the alcohol.
Both men immediately set to work with alcoholics at Akron’s City Hospital, where one patient quickly achieved complete sobriety (Pitman 69). In the fall of 1935, a second group of alcoholics slowly took shape in New York. A third appeared at Cleveland in 1939. It had taken over four years to produce 100 sober alcoholics in the three founding groups. That same year, the Fellowship published it’s basic textbook, Alcoholics Anonymous. The text, written by Bill, explained A.A.’s philosophy and methods, the core of which was the now well-known Twelve Steps to Recovery (Pitman 75 & 76). The book was reinforced by case histories of around thirty recovered members. From this point on, A.A’s development was rapidly growing (Wekesser 36).
On February 27, 2014, I visited an Alcohol Anonymous (A.A) therapeutic group meeting called Another Chance. Another Chance is an intergroup meeting located inside the Concord Baptist Church of Christ, at 833 Gardner C. Taylor Boulevard, Brooklyn, NY 11216. Another Chance has been in operation for over thirty years, and holds open discussion meetings on alcohol use and prevention, every Thursday from six in the evening until seven o’clock. This group interaction with alcohol substance use and abuse focuses on helping all members regardless of race, ethnicity or culture, to abstain from drinking one day at a time; and encourages them to maintain healthy thoughts and emotions through the use of the “Twelve Steps and Traditions” of recovery and intervention approaches.
The war on drugs in our culture is a continuous action that is swiftly lessening our society. This has been going on for roughly 10-15 years and has yet to slow down in any way. Drugs continue to be a problem for the obvious reason that certain people abuse them in a way that can lead to ultimate harm on such a person. These drugs do not just consist of street drugs (marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy), but prescription medications as well. Although there are some instances where drugs are being used by subjects excessively, there has been medical research to prove that some of these drugs have made a successful impact on certain disorders and diseases.
The topic of alternate policies to the U.S. Drug War has always been an interesting and thought provoking topic for me. Over nearly the past four decades, the U.S. government, along with state and local agencies, have spent billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of man hours, and many lives with little to show for stopping the flow of drugs into or the use of drugs in this country. The only true outcome from these expenditures and all of this enforcement are more robust resupply networks, more refined and potent drugs, deepening psychological issues, and alienating specific aspects of American society.
In his article “Numbers Tell of Failure in Drug War”, Eduardo Porter, economic journalist for the New York Times, argues that despite the billions of dollars spent and countless number of lives lost, the War on Drugs has been a complete failure. Porter particularly wants us to review the methods used by the American government regarding drug control, in order to more successfully protect United States citizens and their health. He writes that the last thirty years has been spent fighting a war that cannot be won. Porter points out that in those 30 years, general use of hard drugs, as well as use of illegal drugs by teenagers, has not declined, but actually increased. Additionally, Americans on average don’t think drug use is even much of
All and all, in the early twenty century, alcoholism permeated society and become a problem. Despite the fact that Alcoholics Anonymous members were increasing alcoholism was still a mystery, and no one could fully understand its effect on people’s lives much less talked about it in a public forum. At this point, the Christian Evangelical movement, under the leadership of Frank ND Buchman, founded Alcoholic Anonymous. Another crucial person in the organization’s history was Bill Wilson who discover the power of anonymity as a key concept of the group expansion and growth of its memberships, and made its membership open for every one independently of what was their faith beliefs by referring to a supreme being as High Power or others might called God.
One of the most prevalent misconceptions, Benson and Rasmussen, contend is the notion that a large percentage of drug users commit nondrug crimes, what might be called the “drugs-cause-crime” assumption implicit in the government’s drug-war strategy. If true, then an effective crackdown on ...
It has been one hundred years since the U.S. joined the war on drugs and drug use has only been increasing. Increasing at an alarming rate. According to the National Institute of Drug Use “[i]n 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans… had used an illicit drug in the past month.” (Nationwide, 2015). Drug use and addiction affect many americans. The approach that America has been taking to fight drug use involves criminalizing addicts and outcasting them from society. In order to reduce drug use and the number of addicts in the U.S, the government must completely change its idea of what addiction is and its policy on dealing with it.
In this article, the researchers studied the impact of Alcoholics Anonymous on sobriety and gender differences and extroversion in success of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Alcoholics Anonymous, women consist of one-third of the members (Krentzmen, Brower, Cranford, Bradley, & Robinson, 2012). Also, women tend to be more extroverted (Krentzmen et al., 2012). The researchers questioned if extroversion was the reason that women did better in Alcoholics Anonymous, attending more meetings and having longer rates of success (Krentzmen et al., 2012). AA includes group fellowship and working with mentors, both activities that extroverts would be more comfortable doing than introverts. Previous studies have showed that being outgoing is associated with staying in AA for more than one year (Krentzmen et al., 2012). The main research questions were if participation in AA was predictive of sobriety, the difference between women and men, and if this difference was a result of extroversion. Their hypothesis was that AA membership would be associated with more sobriety, that success rates would be higher for women, and that the
The war on drugs has been heavily criticized over the years due to its incompetence in reducing drug use. This is probably due to the fact that we have never fought the “war on drugs as we have fought other adversaries”, as Charles B. Rangel writes in “Why Drug Legalization Should Be Opposed”(288). However, in “Should Drugs Be Legalized?”, William J. Bennett contends that “every civilized society has found it necessary to exert some form of control over mind-altering substances”, which justifies the importance of the war on drugs (292). In “We’re Losing the Drug War Because Prohibition Never Works”, Hodding Carter III says that “hard drugs are estimated to kill 4,000 people a year directly and several tens of thousands indirectly” (290). Gary E. Johnson states in “The Case for Drug Legalization” that “2,000 to 3,000 people died in 1998 from abusing cocaine and heroine” (285). I deem drug legalization unnecessary because drug use is already decreasing. Furthermore, legalizing drugs will also result in the actions of imposing harm onto others.