Letter: Twelve helpful steps that can also hinder
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.AS Ursula Kenny suggests, many people have benefited from AA and its "12-step" offshoots; for some, the movement's internalised authoritarianism may be a necessary antidote to behaviour that has lost all sense of personal or social boundaries.
That said, the movement has from the first been associated with the political right. The 12 steps are based on the ideas of Frank Buchman, a disagreeable character who founded the so-called "Oxford Group" and was notorious for his adulation of the Nazis. In the Fifties, Buchman's "Moral Rearmament" came to function as an ideological arm of US foreign policy, embodying some of its least attractive features, including the cultivation of brutal right-wing regimes.
Despite AA's claim to the contrary, the movement remains profoundly political. The AA disease model of alcohol and other drug dependence, coupled with the insistence that this "disease" is located solely within the individual, is the main reason for the spectacular failure of the US to address the social and epidemiological dimensions of drug use, and for the diversion of resources into the ineffectual "drugs war".
Alan MacColl, St Andrews
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments