Butternutters Still at It: Syracuse's Renegade AA Group With a Body Count

The Butternutters is a renegade Syracuse AA group whose members advocate cold-turkey detox from alcohol, addictive drugs, and psych meds without medical supervision; believe that mental illness is made up; and pressure members to distance themselves from family and friends.

Unity, Service, and Recovery - with a side of mind control and sexual degradation! Obviously, I stole this graphic; unfortunately, I'm so shameless that I don't even remember where I stole it from.

For the 12+ years that I have attended Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings in Syracuse, New York, "Beware of the Butternutters" was sotto voce advice to newcomers who were lucky enough to hear it in time.

Granted, I never heard the group's problems mentioned during the meetings themselves. The Butternutters were listed on the Syracuse Intergroup AA meeting directory in just the same fashion as every other group that I attended.

In casual conversation, though, I heard dark, sometimes humorous things: That it was like a cult, with members forced to give up their cars and to live together; that members didn't believe in mental illness; that newcomers were advised to detox off of alcohol, their psych meds, and other drugs cold-turkey, and that established members without medical training sometimes supervised this process.

I remember hearing these stories about the Butternutters and thinking to myself that they sounded hyperbolic - embellished in the way that campfire tales and urban legends often are.

I was intrigued enough that I remember considering whether I should attend one Butternutters meeting for the hell of it, but I quickly became comfortable enough with my home group that visiting other meetings was something that I typically only did when out-of-town.

Suffice it to say that what I heard about the Butternutters wasn't exaggerated, and it didn't come close to revealing the full extent of what was going on with the group.

I decided to write this blog five years after the Syracuse.com articles and videos dropped because I recently met an AA newcomer who had attended a Butternutters meeting last month. Despite the fact that he had his own means of transportation, the Butternutters insisted on picking him up from his place of work so that they could carpool together, a tactic meant to prevent newcomers who realize that they're dealing with unhinged people from leaving the meetings early.

Based on what this newcomer told me and everything else that I've heard through the lively Upstate grapevine, the Butternutters are still at it.

At this point, the Butternutters meeting has been removed from the Syracuse AA Intergroup listings and from most other online resources for finding 12-Step meetings; however, it took the Syracuse.com exposé mentioned below for anyone to take action.*

*The group had been removed once before based on concerns raised at a regional AA conference, but it was re-listed again shortly thereafter. The group now refers to itself as the "Syracuse Group," which, conveniently, makes its shady history almost invisible on Google.

Needless to say, it is deplorable that the members of an organization that prides itself on rigorous honesty took so long to take action against this dangerous group.

***

When I link to outside pieces through this blog, I usually take a couple of minutes to include my own experience and analysis.

Today, though, I'm keeping my commentary to a minimum so that anyone with interest in this topic can devote whatever time they have available to reading and viewing the solid investigative journalism of Marnie Eisenstadt and Patrick Lohmann of Syracuse.com, who - at a time when local journalism is rotting in its unmarked, pissed-upon grave - spent more than a year putting together their praiseworthy exposé on the group.

What I do want to say, though, is this: I get the same vibe from reading about and reflecting on this issue as I did when I first started hearing about the sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations. What seemed, at first, to be isolated necrosis soon revealed itself to be systemic cancer related to unaccountable power structures that care more about image than protecting vulnerable people. (Just as with the Christian churches, I discovered that many of the harmful practices that the Butternutters were criticized for were fairly common among the 12-Step groups that I had attended; it was a question of extent and intensity rather than of black-and-white differences).

The only requirement to become an AA group is to have two or more members who wish to stop drinking. Unlike churches, which have complicated financial ties that make them vulnerable to tax oversight and nonprofit designation removal, AA groups are financially self-supporting organizations on shoestring budgets, and - like other self-help groups - subject to no meaningful oversight.

Exacerbating this problem is the culture of AA, which pressures members not to share anything negative about the Program out of fear that people won't attend and receive life-changing, sometimes even lifesaving, support. Not only that, but it's not clear who, exactly, would take on the responsibility for reporting something like what was going on with the Butternutters, as AA and NA don't have leaders in the traditional sense, and the "principles before personalities" tradition very much cautions against publicly identifying oneself as a member or breaking the veil of confidentiality about what transpires during meetings.

Add to this the fact that the United States' "practicing medicine without a license" laws tend to be geared toward people trying to make a buck using deceptive credentials rather than rogue 12-Step groups detoxing people from alcohol cold-turkey on a carpeted floor (yes, that's apparently a treasured Butternutters pastime), and the issue of who would care is equally complicated.

You'd think that a death or three - especially of a third-year SUNY-Upstate medical student with a shining future ahead of him - would interest the authorities, but never underestimate how little people care about drug addicts and alcoholics. Stigma is real, and silence is deadly.

Absent a nuanced understanding of mental illness and cult dynamics, even law enforcement might struggle to understand why people don't just "choose to leave" the meetings that they at first willingly attended.

For what little it's worth, although I have attended hundreds of 12-Step meetings and feel that I have benefitted from doing so, I no longer recommend that people use AA or NA as their primary recovery modality.

For one, AA and NA don't give adequate attention to the physical aspect of recovery from addiction. Meetings are filled with chain-smoking, coffee-swilling old-timers whose blood pressure is probably worse than when they were drinking.

Secondly, meetings don't teach the CBT and DBT skills that have been essential to my recovery. These are evidence-based practices that, in the scant comparative research available, are considerably more effective than 12-Step group participation (although we cannot really know how effective the latter is because the tradition of anonymity is used to argue against data collection - this despite the fact that statistics can, of course, be collected without violating individuals' privacy).

Moreover, I've mentioned the 13th Step Documentary, which addresses older men who are established in recovery sexually / romantically preying upon younger, female newcomers to the Program - something that I've personally witnessed.

What I do recommend is that people try out SMART or 12-Step meetings as a supplemental tool for building a sober support network. As British journalist Johann Hari has argued, the benefits of 12-Step groups are likely down to the community that they offer to lonely, hopeless, marginalized addicts.*

*Click here or see link at end of article for my notes on Hari's "Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong" TED Talk, which is the single most illuminating lecture on addiction that I've ever come across.

As with the Christian churches, I think it's long since time to separate the baby and the bathwater when it comes to the benefits of 12-Step participation.

At the very least, now that addiction is a mainstream concern and there are 12-Step programs all over planet Earth, it's time to consider a more robust power structure and some meaningful oversight.

Without further ado, here's a link to all of the articles and videos about the Butternutters that Marnie Eisenstadt and Patrick Lohmann put together.

If you've had a negative experience with a 12-Step group that you'd like to share, either comment below or message me using the "Contact" form on this website.

Love you all. Stay safe.

Brian