What are the odds of staying clean and sober?  This is a tricky question and you can probably find the data out there to get whatever answer you really want to hear in a lot of cases.

For example, some people will argue that if a person has truly surrendered to the disease of addiction, and they accept a recovery solution fully and work it into their life with a serious effort, then they have a 100 percent chance of staying clean.

On the other hand, we could argue that if someone goes to treatment but does not really want to stay clean and sober for themselves, then they have a zero percent chance of staying clean.

So you have to sort of ask yourself: what are we really measuring here?  Are we considering all the people who go to a drug or alcohol rehab?  Are we considering all of the people who try a 12 step program?  Does this include people who abandon the program, or just those who stick it out and stay with the program the whole way through?

Of course everyone’s situation is unique in recovery.  People find a different path to sobriety and their story will be unique.

Even if you have a drug rehab center that is completely voluntary, you will still have people there who do not really want to get clean.  So why are they there in treatment?  For a number of different reasons.  Some are there because they need a break and need to dry out.  They might be telling themselves that they are serious about recovery, but deep down they might have no intention of staying clean.  Then there might be people who have gone into treatment because their spouse begged them to or forced them to or whatever.

Twelve step programs such as AA claim about a 75 percent success rate “of those who really tried.”  Now that is a pretty subjective measure because they are throwing out the cases where they deem that the people did not “really try.”  Modern day studies that measure success rates in sobriety do not have the ability to throw out data that they do not want to use.  They start with a sample of people and then measure the rate of success and they are not allowed to discard data that they do not think applies to their study.

One thing to point out though is that most people who go to an AA meeting do not “really try,” as AA census data has shown that almost 80 percent of everyone who goes to their first AA meeting will leave AA within a year and never come back.  So most alcoholics who try AA do not “really try.”