Gottalife

As a non believer when I arrived, that is exactly how I saw AA, and that is how I would define secular. it is still the same today, everyone is welcome regardless of belief or no belief.

When we get into the possibility of including more options in the AA program, quite a few are included in the big book but unfortunately, for the type of alcoholic they were dealing with, these ideas were rarely, if ever, successful. In a way it was part of the diagnosis.

Interestingly it seems Bill was pretty easy going about the program and even watered it down a bit in an effort to be more inclusive. Bob and Clarence took a much more spiritual approach and were considerably more successful. Cleveland AA was so successful that many people thought that was where AA started.

It is a shame to judge Bill's medically supervised LSD experiments by the standards and knowledge of today. It gets pretty close to character assassination, a polite form of murder to knock him for doing what he did in the times in which he lived. In fact he may have been well ahead of his time, and in any case those experiements were going on with alcoholics all around the world at the time.

The concept of using psychodellic drugs to bring on mystical or conversion experiences is still current in the world of psychiatry. Some experts believe, like Jung, that the only solution for extreme cases is some kind of conversion experience, and they have been trying for years to bring this about through medical means. Their efforts have been largely unsuccessful, but a recent peer review of Bill's case showed that a single dose of LSD may have had a positive effect. More research required they say.

One hopes that any volunteers for future research will not be subject to the level of criticism that Bill has been.