Editor’s note: This is Episode 1 of “Drunk with Power,” a four-part investigation.

Syracuse, N.Y. — Four times every weekday, dozens of people walk through the front door of 732 Butternut St. in Syracuse and into a secret meeting.

They drink coffee out of mismatched cups and talk about their deepest despair.

This is how it has been for 30 years. They think they are going to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, but they are showing up for something vastly different and dangerous.

The organization called “The Syracuse Group” or “The Butternutters” offers a hard-core, controlling brand of sobriety unlike traditional AA groups.

The Syracuse Group routinely gives hundreds of desperate and impressionable alcoholics harmful advice, a Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard investigation reveals.

Interviews with former members of the group, social service workers and doctors in Syracuse reveal the practices of a group that cloaks itself in secrecy and puts members at risk.

The Butternutters push a zero-tolerance approach to all medication: You are not sober if you are on any prescriptions. That means convincing members who are taking medication for serious mental-health issues to drop their drugs.

This goes against medical standards and AA rules, and with good reason: Roughly half of all people seeking treatment for addiction also have a mental illness.

Alcoholics need to solve the mental illness to stop drinking and that often requires medication, said Dr. Tolani Ajagbe, chief of psychiatry at Crouse Hospital and medical director of Crouse Chemical Dependency Treatment Center.

Ajagbe said the Syracuse Group is well-known among his colleagues and patients: “I think it’s a very dangerous practice.”

Dr. Tolani Ajagbe, chief of psychiatry at Crouse Hospital and medical director of Crouse Chemical Dependency Treatment Center. Dennis Nett | dnett@syracuse.com

But the Butternutters have operated, for decades, below the radar in the unregulated world of self-help groups. The only requirement to call yourself an AA group is two people with a desire to stop drinking. No government agency, at any level, regulates the group’s actions or methods.

At least three members of the Syracuse Group have died by their own hands since 2008 — two suicides and a drug overdose. In those three cases, the former group members’ relatives or other Butternutters say the rogue AA group’s practices played a role. But it’s difficult to know how many people have been harmed following the group’s misguided advice.

Former Syracuse Group member Dean Wolferd said he was told by other members of the group to ignore his doctor. Wolferd, a property manager in Syracuse at the time, had struggled with bipolar disorder for years. He took lithium, a medication widely used for the illness. When Wolferd found the Syracuse Group, he was drinking and feeling suicidal.

Group members told him to stop taking his prescriptions, that his illness was made up, he said. He took their advice.

“The time I went off my medications I became like a little hero there. ‘Look at Dean. He’s off his medications. He’s sober,’ ” Wolferd said. He was held up as an example.

“There is no such thing as synthetic sobriety,” one of the Syracuse Group members says in a recording of a 2017 meeting. When on medications, “God cannot get ahold of me. So that I can’t feel what it is I need to feel."

The Syracuse Group tries to exert a level of control described by former members, outreach workers and clinicians as cult-like.

The critics tell stories of how the group pressures people to cut themselves off from all other help or sever ties with family and friends. This is the opposite of AA’s guidance.

“This goes against the idea of building a sober support network, to be able to go anywhere and reach out,” said Rob Rosolanko, a substance abuse counselor and former heroin addict who attends other AA meetings regularly.

In another questionable practice, the Syracuse Group at times acts as a kind of treatment center.

Members are encouraged to go off alcohol, called detoxing, while crashing on the floor at the Butternut meeting place, sources say. Without doctors around to respond to the medical risks of detoxing, this is dangerous and possibly illegal.

Syracuse.com reporters reached out to group leaders, seeking comment for this story. Leaders refused to be interviewed.

Alcoholics Anonymous has for 80 years offered “12 step” meetings to help alcoholics and drug addicts all around the world. Together, the members build a network of people who can support each other as they work to stop drinking and repair their lives.

AA leaders know they have a problem on Butternut Street. At least once, regional AA organizers kicked the Syracuse Group off a list of AA meetings in the region because of its radical approach. It was restored. Then in June, the Syracuse group was removed again because of concerns raised by Syracuse.com.

The group’s meetings and practices continue.

Over the next week, Syracuse.com’s investigation will unveil concerns about the Butternutters. These findings are based on interviews with more than 30 people who attended meetings or know about the Syracuse Group’s practices. Reporters also reviewed more than 20 hours of audio recordings of the group’s meetings.

Aerial view of Butternut Street on Syracuse's North Side, facing south toward downtown.N. Scott Trimble | strimble@syracuse.com

Ben Kress found the Syracuse Group last September. He was a third-year medical student at Upstate Medical University. He was struggling with addiction, depression and insomnia. He became addicted to opiates in his early 20s from prescriptions after two back surgeries to correct football injuries.

Kress had just started back at Upstate following two years off for a prestigious fellowship at a lab in Denmark.

He had been told by a member of the group that he shouldn’t be taking his Prozac, which he’d taken on and off for years, according to his mother and other sources.

“Ben told me, ‘It was like a cult,’ ” said his mother, Evie Weinstein. He told her he was just going to try going off the Prozac and insomnia medication he was taking. “To see if I can be completely drug-free,” she said he told her.

He ditched the drugs for several weeks and seemed to spiral deeper into depression, his mother said.

One of the last things he did the day he died was walk through the front door of the Butternutters and sit down for a meeting.

Do you have some knowledge of the Syracuse Group or related groups? Contact our reporters:

Patrick Lohmann at email | twitter | 315-766-6670

Marnie Eisenstadt at email | twitter| Facebook | 315-470-2246

“Drunk With Power” series

About the reporting: Read about the sourcing for this investigation and how we handled the naming of AA members.

15 Drunk with power: Inside a rogue AA group in Syracuse

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