The Face That Costs Nothing

A treatment centre needs one thing it cannot manufacture: somebody credible saying it worked. Outcome figures are contested, the staff are paid, and everybody knows both. What settles a frightened family's doubt is a person who has been there, looking into a camera, telling the truth. So the facility asks a grateful former patient, and gratitude is real, and the answer is usually yes. Now look at what changed hands. That man's recovery very likely happened in church basements, for free, among people who never sent him a bill — and his credibility was built there. It is being spent here, in a market, on a business. A.A.'s own literature explains exactly why he is the one worth asking (A.A. pamphlet P-43): "Alcoholics who have recovered through our program are themselves the strongest attraction that A.A. has." He is the attraction. That is the asset. And when he mentions where he goes to meetings, an endorsement nobody voted on arrives attached to a name that has never endorsed anything, and there is nobody sitting on A.A.'s side of that table to say so.