Here are some of
the things we dreamed. Hospitals didn't like alcoholics, so we thought we'd
build a hospital chain of our own. People needed to be told what alcoholism was,
so we'd educate the public, even rewrite school and medical textbooks. We'd
gather up derelicts from skid rows, sort out those who could get well, and make
it possible for the rest to earn their livelihood in a kind of quarantined
confinement. Maybe these places would make large sums of money to carry on our
other good works. We seriously thought of rewriting the laws of the land, and
having it declared that alcoholics are sick people. No more would they be
jailed; judges would parole them in our custody. We'd spill A.A. into the dark
regions of dope addiction and criminality. We'd form groups of depressive and
paranoid folks; the deeper the neurosis, the better we'd like it. It stood to
reason that if alcoholism could be licked, so could any
problem.
1981 AAWS Inc.
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, pages
155-156