The New York Times has drunk the woke Kool-Aid and, in doing so, turned against one of the most effective tools against problem drinking.

A Dec. 27 op-ed piece headlined “The Patriarchy of Alcoholics Anonymous,” by sobriety expert Holly Whitaker, accused of sexism an organization that has rescued millions from the hopeless depths of alcoholism.

The essay struck this progressive Times reader as just the latest attempt to find bigotry and misogyny anywhere, nowadays a calling card of left-leaning media outlets. So far, so drearily familiar.

But as a recovering alcoholic, I was alarmed by the piece’s dangerous ideas. Alcoholism is a ­potentially lethal disease, and it is no exaggeration that this article could lead to avoidable fatalities — by steering young women away from the world’s most prolific ­recovery program.

“This program,” Whitaker writes of AA, “was designed to break down white, male privilege.” It thus “made sense for the original members: It reminded them that they were not God and encouraged them to humble themselves, to admit their weaknesses, to shut up and listen. Perhaps these were much-needed messages when it came to the program’s original intended audience.” But women need power.

No, Ms. Whitaker, AA’s Twelve Steps and principles were designed to arrest alcoholism, a progressive, incurable and eventually fatal disease that knows no race, gender or creed.

Founded in the 1930s by two men (how misogynistic!) in Ohio, today AA has more than 115,000 groups in some 175 countries. It didn’t become so widespread by breaking down white, male privilege. It got that big because it was the first program ever to prove effective in combating alcoholism.

The piece gets worse. Taking issue with AA’s first step — admitting powerlessness over alcohol — Whitaker finds the very idea anathema to her ethos of Girl Power über alles: “Today’s women don’t need to be broken down or told to be quiet,” she writes. “We need the opposite. I worry that any program that tells us to renounce power that we have never had poses the threat of making us sicker.”

Whitaker thus conflates societal powerlessness, defined according to contemporary feminism, compared with AA’s use of the word, which applies not to the world at large but to the specific condition of being unable to stop drinking. As an alcoholic, I am powerless over alcohol because, if I imbibe it, it is nearly impossible for me not to drink to excess and, eventually, to oblivion.

Alcoholism, like any disease, isn’t sexist. And whatever perceived gender imbalances or other micro-aggressions that exist in AA are insignificant compared to the prospect of drinking oneself to death. Whitaker is nitpicking an existential crisis, akin to a cancer patient calling chemotherapy racist.

But then again, Whitaker doesn’t believe in alcoholism, as she says forthrightly on her Web site; her problem drinking was all society’s fault.

“I drank to feel a sense of wholeness that had been conditioned out of me by society, to combat a powerlessness that was my birthright as a woman.”

An estimated 88,000 Americans die from alcohol-related causes each year, the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States. As Whitaker herself writes, women are the fastest-growing demographic becoming dependent on alcohol.

“They’re drinking because they have so little power,” she claims, “because all they’ve ever done is follow the rules and humble themselves, because their egos have been crushed under a system that reduces their value to subservience, likability and silence.”

No, no, no. Regardless of how put-upon by society those women may be, they are drinking because they suffer from alcoholism, a disease recognized by the American Medical Association. A disease that has no known cure, only therapies like group-centric recovery, such as AA, to arrest its progression and help those afflicted remain permanently abstinent from inebriating substances.

Whitaker’s poorly argued essay is a uniquely frightening display of cancel culture: one that attempts to cancel the likelihood of female alcoholics recovering from a progressive, incurable and deadly disease. She and her editorial enablers at The New York Times should be ashamed of themselves.

Christopher Dale is a writer in New York. Twitter: @ChrisDaleWriter