Alcohol research

The AA Story in Connecticut, Sapir J, Connecticut Review on Alcoholism, Vol.8 (7), 25-28, 1957

Extract:

"Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is an honest [sic] desire to stop drinking. A.A. has no dues or fees. It is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution; does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety."

-- Preface to all A.A. literature.

No one can review the literature put out by Alcoholics Anonymous without being caught up in the sheer excitement of its wild fire growth both here and all over the world. Nothing else can so well make manifest the extent and desperation of the need this fellowship has been able to fill for so many.

Although the movement was born in 1935, and by 1941 had but 2,000 members, some of these belonged to pioneering groups in the Connecticut towns of Westport and Greenwich. Connecticut, thus, was in the movement almost from the beginning. When, in 1941, the Jack Alexander article in the Saturday Evening Post brought the A.A. message to millions of readers all over the country, those who wrote in from this state for help could be referred to groups within its borders. By the time Connecticut got its first clinics for the treatment of alcoholism into operation - in the late 1940's - A.A. groups were firmly established in New Haven, Hartford, Stamford, Bridgeport and other cities as well as in Westport and Greenwich, and a substantial number of native citizens of this state owed their very life, as they would themselves say, to the sobriety and active fellowship they found in the movement. Its success, together with the success of the pioneering work done by the Yale Plan Clinics, demonstrated to the Connecticut legislature that alcoholism could be arrested and alcoholics rehabilitated, and prepared the way for the granting of state support for a rehabilitation service, and the creation in 1945 of the Connecticut Commission on Alcoholism.”

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