I "manned up" when I was 48 and realized that alcohol was causing me to have anger issues. I never took a drink after that and I play in bars and am around alcohol all of the time. There are constant bar fights, brawls and stabbings in some of the dives I play in (typical blues bars). But I am a anomaly. Very few people walk in off the street and stay. I even got a temporaru sponsor at my first meeting although it took another 4 years to work the steps. Now it's an ongoing process of working the steps in all of the other areas of my flawed life.

IMHO we have as much rage here as any other locality, it just seems to manifest itself differently and geographic location would lend itself to that equation as much as the microclimates we have in the Bay Area.

As far as the rest of Bill W.'s life I can't comment on that as I have not studied beyond the Big Book - Noah ended up an alcoholic (after the Ark thing) but they don't put that in the childrens bible story books.

Also the Apostle Paul had a "thorn" in his side that he asked God to remove and He wouldn't stating "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 COR 12:9). The moral of the story is we all have a "thorn" of some sort. It never specified what that thorn was either...

Not trying to get off on a religious tangent here, but recovery programs are spiritually based (most anyway). And your "Higher Power" can be what you define it to be.

At the risk of losing my anonymity, "being a friend of Bill W." is AA speak for "I am in the program". I never met or worked with Bill W. (I did see the movie though ;-) He died in 1971 when I was 24 and long before I got into the program. LSD was tried for all sorts of psychological maladies and even as a warfare weapon so don't take too much of that Wikipedia crap too literally.