She asked an LA cab driver to stop at a liquor store. He drove her to the ER instead. Isabel on six years of half-sobriety and the ranch that finally ended it.

She was facing prison when the case collapsed on a technicality. She went to rehab anyway, because she promised. Two years later a rooftop cocktail undid it.

She did cocaine so she would finally clean the apartment, and never cleaned it. Out on her own at fifteen, she now runs the women’s home that once took her in.

She flew out for Coachella at 23 and never once left the house. Nine months sober, her father died. What held when grief and a loss in her body came next.

A 1991 diagnosis came with two years to live, so he decided to go out in a blaze of glory. Then the one sponsor he wanted turned him down. He stayed anyway.

Caught at thirteen with a gallon of whiskey, he was told his father had been through enough. Then a teacher let him keep telling jokes in class, and it held.

Hers started in a Park Avenue doctor’s office, his in East Texas. The sentence that turned her around: nobody did this to you, your own choices got you here.

For her 40th birthday her family handed her a fake birth certificate as a joke. Years later her son reached into the pancake mix and pulled out a vodka bottle.

The day a frightening diagnosis landed she wanted coffee at home, not a drink. Driving back she looked up and saw a skywriter spelling a message over her house.

His mom pulled it up on the family computer with his older cousin sitting right there. Alex felt lower than scum - and a sermon had already named it for him.

Her mom called on April 1 to say she had drunk the night before, then said April Fools. Jenna stayed calm, and saw how far Al-Anon had rewired her reactions.

Her dad told her not to bother applying to his college. Spared from being held back only because of her twin, Laura was hospitalized at 15 for drinking.

Thirteen of them ran together; nine died and four got sober. Richard turned back twice walking to his first meeting. John was homeless at 15, by choice.

After four decades he still calls his clients’ sponsors to ask which step they are on. Getting sober, he says, only clears the deck - the undercurrents run on.

His brother’s illness kept their parents at the hospital, so at 12 Ben O. was home alone and done listening. By 17 he had tried heroin and left school.

An elevator door crushed his hand and he went back inside twice to use before he let the ambulance take him. Peter E. on six months sleeping on the 4 train.

She was deliberately awful to the caseworker who kept calling anyway. Tonie D. on the years she was a dollar sign, and why drugs were the small part of it.

At 39 a nurse refused to send him home and he was in surgery within the hour. Lucky Church on the eating and drinking he never counted as an addiction.

The man who finally got her off the street was the officer serving her warrants. Alison V. on five months in a cell and the judge who sent her to treatment.

He turned up at a meeting in Georgia freshly beaten up. A stranger said it did not look like he won, asked if he could go one day dry, and stayed with him.