Alcoholics Anonymous Makes Its Stand Here
By ELRICK B. DAVIS
Much has been written about Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization
doing major work in reclaiming the habitual drinker. This is the
first of a series describing the work the group is doing in Cleveland.
Success
By now it is a rare Clevelander who does not know, or know of,
at least one man or woman of high talent whose drinking had become
a public scandal, and who suddenly has straightened out "over
night," as the saying goes-the liquor habit licked. Men who
have lost $15,000 a year jobs have them back again. Drunks who
have taken every "cure" available to the most lavish
purse, only to take them over again with equally spectacular lack
of success, suddenly have become total abstainers, apparently
without anything to account for their reform. Yet something must
account for the seeming miracle. Something does.
Alcoholics Anonymous has reached the town.
Fellowship
Every Thursday evening at the home of some ex-drunk in Cleveland,
40 or 50 former hopeless rummies meet for a social evening during
which they buck each other up. Nearly every Saturday evening they
and their families have a party just as gay as any other party
held that evening despite the fact that there is nothing alcoholic
to drink. From time to time they have a picnic, where everyone
has a roaring good time without the aid of even one bottle of
beer. Yet these are men and women who, until recently, had scarcely
been sober a day for years, and members of their families who
all that time had been emotionally distraught, social and economic
victims of another's addition.
These ex-rummies, as they call themselves, suddenly salvaged from
the most socially noisome of fates, are the members of the Cleveland
Fellowship of an informal society called "Alcoholics Anonymous."
Who they are cannot be told, because the name means exactly what
it says. But any incurable alcoholic who really wants to be cured
will find the members of the Cleveland chapter eager to help.
The society maintains a "blind" address: The Alcoholic
Foundation, Box 657, Church Street Annex Postoffice, New York
City. Inquiries made there are forwarded to a Cleveland banker,
who is head of the local Fellowship, or to a former big league
ball player who is recruiting officer of the Akron Fellowship,
which meets Wednesday evenings in a mansion loaned for the purpose
by a non-alcoholic supporter of the movement.
Cured
The basic point about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it is a fellowship
of "cured" alcoholics. And that both old-line medicine
and modern psychiatry had agreed on the one point that no alcoholic
could be cured. Repeat the astounding fact:
These are cured.
They have cured each other.
They have done it by adopting, with each other's aid, what they
call "a spiritual way of life."
"Incurable" alcoholism is not a moral vice. It is a
disease. No dipsomaniac drinks because he wants to. He drinks
because he can't help drinking.
He will drink when he had rather die than take a drink. That is
why so many alcoholics die as suicides. He will get drunk on the
way home from the hospital or sanitarium that has just discharged
him as "cured." He will get drunk at the wake of a friend
who died of drink. He will swear off for a year, and suddenly
find himself half-seas over, well into another "bust."
He will get drunk at the gates of an insane asylum where he has
just visited an old friend, hopeless victim of "wet brain."
Prayer
These are the alcoholics that "Alcoholics Anonymous"
cures. Cure is impossible until the victim is convinced that nothing
that he or a "cure" hospital can do, can help. He must
know that his disease is fatal. He must be convinced that he is
hopelessly sick of body, and of mind and of soul. He must be eager
to accept help from any source even God.
Alcoholics Anonymous has a simple explanation for an alcoholic's
physical disease. It was provided them by the head of one of New
York City's oldest and most famous "cure" sanitariums.
The alcoholic is allergic to alcohol. One drink sets up a poisonous
craving that only more of the poison can assuage. That is why
after the first drink the alcoholic cannot stop.
They have a psychiatric theory equally simple and convincing.
Only an alcoholic can understand another alcoholic's mental processes
and state. And they have an equally simple, if unorthodox, conception
of God.