Adherents follow the program by working consecutively through the steps, and make progress by earning sobriety chips (which they must relinquish if any slip-ups occur). The 12 steps refer to the rules these programs are grounded in: admitting you’re powerless over drugs, understanding that only a higher power can restore you to sanity and asking god to remove your defects of character.
As such, they follow an abstinence model of addiction recovery, requiring members to maintain complete sobriety. AA and its related branches approach addiction as a disease using drugs at all makes a person dependent on them. Before the 1930s, popular attempts to treat alcoholism and drug dependency included methods like segregation in asylums, reliance on mutual aid fraternities, and even the use of cocaine, which psychologist Sigmund Freud considered the “magical drug.”Īpproaches like fraternities and sobriety societies had a significant influence on the creation of AA, which was founded by four Christians in 1935. Though the 12-step model of recovery may seem timeless and natural, it hasn’t always been the case. But according to the dominant ways we treat addiction, these casual comforts that many consider unremarkable are irreconcilable with a healthy lifestyle.Īlcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), and related groups remain immensely popular, even nearly a century after their creation. A glass of wine sipped at dinner, a THC edible nibbled on the weekend whether or not it’s acknowledged as such, drug use is often incorporated into the lives of people who would be considered well-adjusted.