“In the preceding chapters you have learned something of alcoholism. We hope we have made clear the distinction between the alcoholic and the non-alcoholic. If, when you honestly want to, you find you cannot quit entirely, or if when drinking, you have little control over the amount you take, you are probably alcoholic. If that be the case, you may be suffering from an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer.” (Chapter 5, Big Book)
If I absolutely have to drink daily but stop at one without
a care, I’m not alcoholic.
If I drink way too much but have no trouble staying sober, I’m
not alcoholic.
The two conditions for being an alcoholic are (a) being compelled
to have the first drink (b) being compelled to continue to excess.
These conditions are cumulative.
This means either is insufficient: both must be met.
Why does the book say ‘or’?
It’s possible it’s merely sloppy. There are other instances
of sloppiness, for instance referring to ‘stopping drinking’ (which is really a
process of going from daily drinking to sobriety via withdrawal and usually
detox) when it obviously means not starting again, once one has detoxed. Another
inconsistency: the section from pages 20 to 21 that sets out the diagnostic distinction
between moderate drinkers, the ‘certain type of hard drinker’, and the real
alcoholic sets the bar very low indeed: beginning to lose control once one
starts to drink plus not being able to stop or moderate once good reason to do
so arises, which is quite right, but then proceeds to give a caricature of only
one particular type of very advanced alcoholic (the Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
type) as the archetype of all alcoholics. Sloppiness is certainly an option.
A story attributed to one of the first hundred, Oscar Weiss,
reported by Joe Hawke and Mark Houston, is that this is a ‘drunk trap’, namely
a trick to ‘catch out’ alcoholics reading the book. This has some plausibility,
because I have often sponsored people who absolutely buy the mental obsession
but are iffy about the physical craving or vice versa, even though they had
been nodding compliantly all through the book up to that point; they see the ‘or’
and believe they can squeeze through the turnstile by admitting to just one of
the two, and merrily continue with the process, ‘revealing’ misgivings about
the more questionable of the two conditions, believing that, since only one
condition must be met, the other can be left unresolved, so the reservation is ‘safe’
to reveal, as it will not be wrestled to the ground. Now that the secret
reservation has been revealed, the sponsee and I can use the opportunity to
settle the matter once and for all. The paragraph can indeed be used as a ‘trap’
to catch reservations. There are other traps, too: the ‘restless, irritable,
discontent paragraph’ ‘traps’ alcoholics who believe that their negative emotions
either cause or are credible reasons in the sense of motivations for their
alcoholic drinking. Such traps force into the open and force into final resolution
either fuzzy thinking or misconceptions. To go one step further, as Oscar Weiss
reports Bill W’s design, and believe that such inconsistencies or difficulties
were deliberately used to ‘trap’ alcoholics firstly has no corroborating evidence
in anything I have read about AA history or the writing of the book and
secondly runs against the stated purpose of the book: to explain AA in a
freestanding manner to people who are on their own and are being encouraged to
take the book, read it, and simply do what it says. To imagine material being
placed in the book that will be particularly useful to the sponsor sitting with
the sponsor is to read a present system into a past environment to which it is
quite alien.
The last possibility is this: the book hedges on purpose
(and there is evidence for this, in Bill W talking about the book), namely it
avoids categorical statements and casts the net wide, at least when the authorial
voice is speaking (categorical statements are left for the various doctors writing
or reported in the book: ‘100% hopeless’). Instead, we have ‘rarely’, ‘probably’,
‘few’, ‘or’ rather than ‘never’, ‘definitely’, ‘all’, ‘and’. Myths abound that Bill
W wanted to put ‘never’ rather than ‘rarely’ in the first paragraph of Chapter
5, but these are concoctions. Bill W’s language is considerably toned down
between the earlier drafts and the final draft, and this language is consistent
with the toning-down.
This, therefore, is the most plausible explanation: Bill W was merely casting the net wide to ‘get in’ as many potential and actual alcoholics into the lifeboat, on the basis that: better in than out.