Later editions added the Twelve Traditions, first adopted in 1946, to formalize and unify the fellowship as a "benign anarchy". Published in 1939 and commonly called "the Big Book", it contains AA's Twelve Step recovery program.
Having exited the Oxford Group to form a fellowship of alcoholics only, Wilson and Smith, along with other early members, wrote Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered From Alcoholism, from which AA acquired its name. Wilson put to Smith that alcoholism was not a failure of will or morals, but a malady from which he had recovered as a member of the Christian revivalist Oxford Group. Bob), then detoxing in an Akron, Ohio hospital. ĪA marks 1935 as its starting year when a 6 months sober, stock speculator Bill Wilson (Bill W.), reeling from a failed proxy deal, sought to maintain his new sobriety by meeting another alcoholic, surgeon Bob Smith (Dr. AA results in higher abstinence rates and lower medical costs compared to either no treatment or treatments led by medical professionals. As of 2020, having spread to diverse cultures, including geopolitical areas normally resistant to grassroots movements, AA has had an estimated worldwide membership of over two million with 75% of those in the U.S.
AA has not endorsed the disease model of alcoholism, to which its program is nonetheless sympathetic, but its wider acceptance is partly due to many members independently promulgating it. Structurally guided by its Twelve Traditions, AA is set up as non-professional, non-denominational, as well as self-supporting and apolitical, with an avowed desire to stop drinking being its sole requirement for membership. Alcoholics Anonymous ( AA) is an international fellowship requiring no membership dues or fees, dedicated to helping alcoholics peer to peer in sobriety through its spiritually inclined Twelve Steps program.