Why I Declared War on Alcoholics Anonymous

August 24, 2026

Charles Hurst, Author

Tom O'Connor, Publisher

I used to be a chronic stage alcoholic. It was really awful in the final years. In the last few years of my addiction, I existed in Hell. One day, I decided to quit. And that was Hell too. But it is over now. I passed ten years of sobriety and am still sober to this day. I'm not an alcoholic anymore.

The above paragraph is the shot I'm firing over the bow at Alcoholics Anonymous. It was from the final lines of my work, The Small Book: How I Beat Alcoholism and Why Alcoholics Anonymous Doesn't Work. I wrote the first draft at five years of sobriety and published it at ten. I am now well over sixteen years clean from my friendship with John Barleycorn.

(John Barleycorn: taken from Jack London's memoir of his alcoholism. John Barleycorn: First published, 1913)

I thoroughly reject the AA philosophy due to their dismal long-term failure rates. Simply put, most who enter the doors of "the room" do not remain sober. And the ones who do are now psychic slaves to what I believe has become more of a cult than a recovery program. Because if one is spending five to six nights a week inside of an AA meeting at five years sober, then a psychological addiction has replaced the physical one.

The Alcoholics Anonymous program is neither physically nor mentally healthy. The one who indoctrinates himself into their methods will believe his being to be forever diseased. An eternal addict. Someone who is sick. The fact is, when one is in the active stages of being an alcoholic, their body is diseased during that time, whether the period lasted for five years or twenty-five. And the body and mind seem certainly ill during the withdrawal, the protracted withdrawal lasting up to two years. But once that neurochemistry has rebalanced itself, you are no longer ill.

You can indeed become ill again — if you pick up that bottle again. But you don't need twelve steps, nightly meetings and a sponsor with his incessant mantras to stay sober. You need one step. A contract with yourself that you will never touch the offending substance again. No matter what. If you lose your job, you don't touch it. If a close family member dies, you don't touch it. If you lose your house, wife, assets, and are sitting on a street corner, then sit on it with a cup of coffee. That's the mental resolve. You end that relationship with J.B. forever. No long-term relationship, no short-term, no one-night stands or situationships. That entity is out of your life forever.

My website https://www.theantiaaconcept.com/ contains a blog that resonates with some and will not with many others — many from the AA community, as my words are the ones largely of a heretic who pontificates during their nightly sermons. They will claim how many have been helped by AA. Their failure rate shows otherwise, and how much they have "helped" the ones who remain in the rooms is a matter of great debate. They claim it is the most successful program to date. There is only one study I've read from Stanford that concurs with that opinion. All other addiction studies seem to point otherwise. The day-to-day fact is that the AA protocol is largely unsuccessful in the long term. Look at the rehabs that are founded on AA principles. The first thing they tell the inpatients is: look to the left and right of you, for that's how many won't make it. That's just great.

I began to notice the AA mantras largely resembled those of a fundamentalist cult. I should know, as I am a former Christian, now an unspecified theist, with a relatively successful channel that researches and exposes apologists' claims as legitimate or not. But the responses I would get were: you were never a true Christian. Your faith wasn't strong to begin with. They never actually looked at the evidence (or lack thereof) I presented in my episodes. The reaction was the same snarl I receive from the AA propagandists you will see in the comments in the video arena. You were never a real alcoholic. Oh, you're an expert who went to two meetings? But they never inwardly examine the painful fact: for the majority of those trying to gain sobriety, they fail.

Wasn't I an alcoholic? Really? Unlike the AA regurgitation of your story, I will tell it once and once only. This endeavor isn't about living in the past but about how to progress in your life. A clean, living life. A healthy and fulfilling life. A life filled with peace and tranquility. Not a life of fear from being too far from the closest "room." The life where you are in constant anxiety of: I'm sober today but don't know about tomorrow. The recovered individual knows he will be sober tomorrow, next week, next year, and for life.

My story is typical. Many times the status of future alcoholism results from a past turbulent upbringing. Terrible parents, bullied school life, the micro and macro traumas that are inflicted on a select few. And one day, usually a very youthful day, a stranger named John Barleycorn knocks on your door and offers you refuge.

That's how it began for me. Although I had resolved being a target by my late teens through bodybuilding, the beginnings of martial arts, and the basic self-taught ability to stand up for myself, the anguish from my youth remained. I had great physical confidence by eighteen but no internal fortitude. I could not date the ingrained anxiety serving as a repellent to the opposite sex. So J.B. gave me the numbing agent. And then he offered a lifetime supply of it.

And I continued. I pursued arduous endeavors. I joined the military, then joined a long-range radio reconnaissance team, falling out of airplanes and carrying hundred-pound packs. I evolved from traditional martial arts to full-contact boxing and Thai boxing. Getting a girlfriend was no longer a problem. I earned a diploma as a physical therapist. But by now, John Barleycorn was not only a close friend but a traveling companion wherever I went. Alcoholism progresses in stages. During my first attempt in college at eighteen, it was strictly a weekend thing. And a "lot" was eight beers, which would leave me wrecked the next morning. In the military, it was weekends, sporadic throughout the week, and heavy post-training exercises. It seemed normal, as all the team members drank as par for this hardcore lifestyle. Sure, we would get smashed one night but then run six to eight miles the next morning. Normality is relative depending on your surroundings. One of those team members is a late-stage alcoholic today.

A lot of guys in the military, like guys in college, binge drink during that time and leave it once that time passes. It seemed that way to me as well. When I returned to college, I kept drinking four beers, once during the week, then a six-pack on the weekend nights. And it appeared I was doing well, as I was making the grades in pre-med courses to gain admission to physical therapy school. But what I didn't understand until a decade and a half later was that, although I had all this physical prowess, had no problem getting a girlfriend, and seemed to be advancing toward a prosperous career, I hadn't resolved the long-term trauma of my youth. J.B. was solving it for me, or so it appeared. He had the door halfway open and was waiting to force his way in completely.

And that happened during spring break of my first year in 1996. I visited my old team member, who was still in the army and taking a language course in Washington, D.C. I was out of classes, so for some reason I just decided to drink every night — a lot. I figured I'd return to the sporadic binging once I got back to campus.

The problem was I didn't. Not this time.

That was when John Barleycorn stormed my gates. Suddenly, the switch was pulled. From that point forth, I drank every night, minus a few exceptions, until I quit it for good at age forty. I drank steadily through sophomore year. I drank my way through physical therapy school. Don't get me wrong, I studied like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, I was in the bottle and usually six or eight of them after I closed the books. I still wonder if it wasn't a minor miracle that I graduated at all.

And then the quantity simply progressed. The nightly six to eight beers became twelve to fifteen those last two years or so. I had largely stopped exercising. I woke up feeling god-awful, threw coffee and Gatorade in me to counter the effects, got through my patient load and continued the cycle the second I got home — after stopping at the liquor store.

Then on January 22, 2009, I stopped. I had about six or seven cans of liquid hops in me when I did, somewhere around ten or eleven that night. I looked in the mirror and saw a face that was flushed and haggard at forty years old. I had three unopened cans left in the refrigerator. I threw them away. And I made that lifelong contract never to open one again.

The withdrawal is as bad as the movies portray. Those first five days I thought I had died and gone to Hell. The next thirty to forty days were awful as well. I will have articles in the future on how I got through the stages of recovery to my two-year cure mark, but it is safe to say it was no easy journey. But here I am today, that dark voyage long concluded, and am well over a decade and a half sober.

So I think it is fair to say, AA, that I was indeed once an alcoholic.

At eleven months sober, I went to two AA meetings at different locations in the course of two weeks. I was still in the long, protracted withdrawal phase and wanted to see if AA had anything to offer. My brother was also a once alcoholic who spent a significant amount of time in the rooms, so yes, AA, I did have some familiarity with your program outside of my two direct encounters. He is sober today, now twenty years clean, and left the rooms behind long ago as well because the experience can be described as nothing less than toxic.

AA members are trapped in the rooms, the mantras, surrounded by fellow cult members. Their entire lives are dictated by their "disease." They lose spouses, who no longer have anything in common with them because of their continued dependence on "working the program." They live in constant fear of being too far from the rooms, returning to them immediately when life throws a wrench into the machine. Their lives aren't recovered; AA has hijacked them. And AA doesn't even have a success rate to justify these kidnappings of those souls in turmoil.

I'm not saying the founding of AA wasn't a good thing in its time. Bill Wilson (known as Bill W.) and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith (known as Dr. Bob) founded AA on June 10, 1935. Bill and Bob addressed a problem that had never been addressed. But the program should have been greatly modified over the years. As in competitive bodybuilding, there were exercises we did in the 1980s that we now know are harmful to the joints and the lumbar spine. So we changed them. AA refuses to modify their program into one of healthy, holistic recovery but continues to ignore the simple fact that for most — the program fails.

So I am now declaring war on them.

Experience the journey of recovery on a 2,600-mile trek where I resolved childhood and regained my soul. THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNING WOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL

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Read Charles' bio by checking his icon at the start of this article.

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