AA works fundamentally by substituting an addiction to Alcohol to one for AA - This to me has always seemed like a workable (if in the short term) way to solve the problem.
(Note that this is a paywall link. Here is a quote to give readers here a gist of that article: "acceptance of the tenets of AA may be associated with positive behavioral change"; the paper describes how working the AA program results in people having a more positive world view)
12-step meetings are not a short-term fix; I have already linked to a paper which shows that two out of three people who regularly go to AA meetings in their first year of alcohol treatment are still sober 16 years later. Here's the original paper with those figures:
