 (Webmaster's Note: This is the
most-recent issue of the new NA Way
Magazine posted on the WSO website. You
will find it in English, German, French, Spanish and
Portuguese. Each file is complete and, because it
captures nearly twenty pages worth of material, may take
some time to load. Please be patient, we believe it will
be worth the wait.)
Table of Contents
The NA Way Magazine,
published in English, French, German, Portuguese, and
Spanish, belongs to the members of Narcotics Anonymous.
Its mission, therefore, is to provide each member with
recovery and service information, as well as
recovery-related entertainment, which speaks to current
issues and events relevant to each of our members
worldwide. In keeping with this mission, the editorial
staff is dedicated to providing a magazine which is open
to articles and features written by members from around
the world, as well as current service and convention
information. Foremost, the journal is dedicated to the
celebration of our message of recovery — "that
an addict, any addict, can stop using drugs, lose the
desire to use, and find a new way to live."The NA
Way
"User’s
Manual"
The NA Way Magazine is a broad-based
service magazine for the NA member. Besides standard
reports from world services, editorial content ranges
from personal recovery experience, to opinion pieces
regarding topicsof concern to NA as a whole, to humor or
nostalgia about the recovery experience. We look for a
spirit of unity and mutual respect, and we don’t
back off from controversy if a constructive solution is
offered. We accept submissions in the same languages in
which we publish editions of The NA Way:
English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
All manuscripts are subject to a review and editing
process and must be accompanied by a signed release.
Criteria for the various sections of the magazine
are as follows:
Feature articles
Everything from reports about current issues or
events in NA to thoroughly documented historical essays
on NA’s beginnings in an area, region, or country.
Please send an inquiry first. Maximum length: 2,500
words.
Sharing
Personal recovery experience, from 500 to 2,000
words in length.
Parables
These are fiction pieces in which the writer
illustrates a spiritual principle or some sort of
recovery-related object lesson. Maximum length 1,500
words.
Picture This
NA groups are invited to send us photographs of
their meeting places. We especially welcome photos that
include meeting formats, recovery literature, posters,
etc.—anything that makes the meeting room looked
“lived-in.” Sorry, we cannot use any photos
that identify NA members.
Humor and "Last Laughs"
"Last Laughs" are NA newsletter clippings
(including material from The NA Way Magazine),
misreadings of NA literature heard at NA events, etc.
Other humor pieces can be anything from a "top
ten" list to a parody of NA’s literature to a
multiple-choice questionnaire. Maximum length: 1,000
words.
Back to the top of the document
Feature Article
Symposium
NA Comes of Age
The fifth of this month (October) marks the
forty-fifth anniversary of NA’s first documented
recovery meeting held in Sun Valley, California. As far
as organizations go, that’s a long time. It’s
not really old, but it’s certainly mature.
In honor of our forty-fifth anniversary, we’ve asked
some older members to compare NA as it existed when they
came in to NA as it is now. They were delighted to tell
us about “the old days” of NA in California,
Australia, and Pennsylvania.* We expected to hear that
these early NA communities were very disorganized,
untutored in the Twelve Traditions, and unable to provide
any services whatsoever. We were surprised to find out
that this wasn’t very often the way things were. In
addition to asking the following members about their
recollections of their early days in recovery, we asked
what they felt NA’s next step should be, in which
areas we still needed to mature. As you’ll see, they
were quite willing to share their ideas.
As most will acknowledge, we’ve matured as a
fellowship. But we’re maintaining a youthful spirit.
We’re still open-minded and still ready to take big
steps that will ensure our growth for another forty-five
years.
BOB B, CALIFORNIA
37 years
Q. When did you get clean?
A. I got clean in 1961, but when I first came around in
1959, there was only one meeting.
Q. Your story in the Basic Text is aptly named (“I
Found the Only NA Meeting in the World”),
but how did you find NA? There wasn’t an NA helpline
at the time, right?
A. I didn’t find NA; my woman did. She was out
looking for help and somebody gave her Jimmy’s
number. So she passes the information on to me that they
got this thing going on over there [in the San Fernando
Valley]. As far as I was concerned it was a foreign
country. Once I got out of South Central, I was lost.
There really wasn’t anyplace for an addict to go
then. There was Lexington, Ft. Worth, and there were a
couple of doctors who were trying to start programs, but
you were talking about big money just to walk in the
door. They had all kinds of crazy ideas as to what drug
addiction was and how to fix it.
Anyway, I went to this meeting, and there were people
reading from this book, and talking about staying
clean—actually they were talking about staying clean
and sober. There weren’t very many of
them—usually about ten, a big meeting might have had
twenty. Very often, half of them were from the North
Hollywood [AA] clubhouse and were there to see what these
addicts were doing.
Q. Did they share in your meetings?
A. As far as what they had to share, the steps
didn’t make sense to me, anyway. I read them. I
heard them. There weren’t a lot of people who could
talk about them—besides Jimmy and some of these
visitors [from AA]. Most of them were what they called
“dually addicted.” They were alcoholics,
members of AA, but they had done drugs, too.
There were people I could talk to, people who I could ask
what they used. That was important then. We had to find
out whether you were a “hope-to-die dope fiend”
or one of them funny-style dope fiends. We were always
downplaying people’s addiction. You had to qualify.
Q. Was it mostly heroin addicts then?
A. Everyone was a heroin addict. There were a few
pillheads, but even that was in conjunction with
[heroin]. Some addicts probably left thinking “oh,
my problem wasn’t that bad” after listening to
us talk, but a lot of that was just gross exaggeration.
Q. Were people pretty accepting of addicts coming to
meetings loaded?
A. Yeah, we’d just tell them not to be too obvious
about it. More often, it was a case of being not quite
certain whether we should drink or not. I mean, as far as
we were concerned, alcohol wasn’t a drug.
Q. Did Jimmy set you straight on that?
A. No, Jimmy didn’t try to force any issues.
Q. So he didn’t tell anybody they weren’t clean
if they were drinking?
A. No, he never told anyone they weren’t clean.
Q. So how did that develop then, that NA members
understood that alcohol was a drug?
A. That happened much later, when we came to some
understanding of the disease concept. We also worked very
closely with some “outsiders”
[non-addicts]—people like Dorothy Gildersleve [a
social worker], Dr. Lewis Quick, and Judge Emerson. They
were constantly referring people to us to get help, so
they were always in touch. They managed to get across
that you weren’t clean if you were drinking. People
came in thinking they could drink, but it was very
short-lived.
We learned by experience. In those days, I think we
violated every tradition that ever was written. They
didn’t mean anything to us; we mixed and matched or
eliminated or whatever. That was what worked for
us—until it didn’t work.
Q. So you had the traditions hanging on the wall …?
A. Yeah, but those were their traditions.
Q. What did you do to violate traditions then?
A. Just talking about Alcoholics Anonymous, doing things
with them. Without their help, a lot of stuff
wouldn’t have happened, especially the institutional
stuff. I’ve got a letter from Tehachapi
[Correctional Institution] or someplace that talks about
“double-dippers”—AA/NA meetings. Anonymity
sometimes got loose.
Q. What about money? Did you take money from outside
sources?
A. We took money from anyone who had it. [Laughs] There
wasn’t a whole lot of money floating around back
then, anyway. No, we had to learn how to return money, in
fact. A couple of places sent us money, saying,
“You’re doing a good job, blah, blah,
blah,” so we sent them a letter and sent the money
back. We were self-supporting as best as we could, but
there were no funds most of the time. We got most of our
printing on credit. Our printer was a program
person—AA program—but he printed for us for a
long time, years, and waited for the money. We never
ended up owing him much; our bills didn’t run over
two or three hundred dollars for the year.
Q. What were you printing then?
A. Just the Little White Booklet.
Q. That was in 1961?
A. Yeah, the early sixties, thereabouts. Then I had to go
do some time, clean up some wreckage, and I started a
meeting in Tehachapi in 1961. But there again, we kind of
rode on the coattails of AA’s institutional thing.
Q. Were you using AA’s literature then?
A. No, Jimmy sent me some Little White Booklets,
[guidelines for] how to run a meeting, that kind of
thing. Anyway, it was the first institutional meeting we
had inside, and there were people there who were
interested in recovery or at least interested in getting
the right piece of paper so they could get out. [Laughs]
Q. It looked good to the parole board?
A. Sometimes. It didn’t look good to my parole
board, but that’s okay. So we’d ask AA if we
could carry in some literature, and they’d usually
let us take half the meeting.
Q. So there was a lot of leniency in interpretation of
the traditions?
A. Well, like I said, we didn’t understand the
traditions then.
Q. It sounds like the AA members didn’t, either.
A. They may have known; they just didn’t care.
Q. Were there more meetings on the street when you got
out?
A. Yeah, there were three.
Q. All in the Valley?
A. No, one in Hollywood, which was important because it
was the only one that was inner-city. People were
starting to show up in meetings. It became like an
alternative [to incarceration]. Not that the parole or
probation departments were in our corner, because they
weren’t. They still had the idea that they could fix
the addict problem. I had a lot of problems with my
parole officer, because I wanted to do it my way. I
wasn’t using, but I was talking crazy shit. I was
still having problems with authority. I thought,
“I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.
I’m bringing you clean tests, and I’m working,
and I’m staying at home, and I’m going to these
meetings”—and he didn’t want me to go to
meetings.
Q. So the correctional community was still pretty worried
about addicts congregating in those days?
A. Yeah, NA had not been validated. Besides, if
you’re on parole, you’re in violation [for
congregating with other addicts or felons]. I had a
difficult three or four years with the parole department.
I had an attitude, and the parole officer, he said,
“Well, I’m going to lock you up and see if you
get a change of attitude.”
Q. Did your PO do that?
A. Yeah.
Q. That’s terrible. So you got locked up for going
to meetings.
A. Yeah, but I came to believe in jail, so they actually
did me a favor.
So, we ran things [in NA] as much as we were supposed to
run them. There was no great filing system, and there was
no office. Jimmy probably had the most consistent
telephone, so people called him.
Q. As far as decision-making for NA, it was done by
whoever was around?
A. No, we had what we called the “parent
organization.” The parent organization consisted of
the secretaries and treasurers of the two or three
meetings.
Q. A representative from each meeting?
A. Yeah.
Q. So it was like a mini-ASC?
A. Yeah, there was about ten of us. As far as services,
we tried to keep some kind of answering service going.
The answering service would answer the phone, then call a
list of NA members to see who lived in the area and was
available for a Twelfth Step call.
Q. So did you go on a lot of Twelfth Step calls?
A. Oh yeah, a Twelfth Step call used to be quite an
event, cause two or three or even six people used to go
out on these Twelfth Step calls. You’d get a bunch
of people to go because you never knew what you were
going to walk into. You’d walk into some pretty
weird Twelfth Step calls—drugs on the table, guns on
the table, some joker paranoid, and his mama called or he
called out of being scared, or whatever. There was a lot
of crazy stuff, but we went anyway. We’d go out and
capture one, put him in the car, and take him to a house,
sit him down and talk to him all night long. There seemed
to be a lot of [NA members] who weren’t working
during the early days.
Q. So you’d sit these guys down and carry the
message.
A. Yeah, and we wouldn’t let them get away, not for
a while, anyway. There wasn’t a lot of places to
take them for detox so sometimes we’d just have to
sit on them. We’d pass them around amongst
ourselves.
Q. I’m assuming these guys were willing?
A. Well, they may not have been so willing, but they
didn’t know what else to do. [Our attitude was]
don’t call if you don’t want help.
Q. So you’d get them through kicking, and turn them
loose? They’d either stay or they wouldn’t?
A. That’s right. Some of us would give them some
matches and say: “Go burn yourself up. Don’t
come around here if you’re not serious.” I
think there was a lot more of that then. It was pretty
hard-nosed. I think the way we grew out of that was that
when the need increased, we tried to write some paper on
how to run a meeting, or about the traditions, or what we
expected to do: help addicts stay clean. We needed some
committee-type work to get the word out [about NA].
Also in the sixties, there was a big turnaround in
[society’s] thinking about treating addicts. There
was the California Rehabilitation Center, stuff like
that. Along with that, they were doing a lot of radio
stuff. They used to come out to meetings and interview
right on the parking lot. [It gave us the opportunity to
explain] what NA is and isn’t. So we started doing
some slots about once a month on a call-in radio station.
After one of these, people were showing up [at meetings]
just by hearing about it on the radio.
Q. When did you start seeing people other than heroin
addicts in meetings?
A. Probably around ’63 or ’64. It was just
about the time of the flower children, and you know, they
were pouring it on, taking whatever. So we said, “I
guess we’ve just got to tolerate this; it is drugs.
They are insane and crazy.” And we were seeing it
work. People started staying clean. There was a lot of
growth from that. Probation officers were sometimes
sending people to us. And then there were some
community-oriented people, friends of NA, so to speak.
That’s where part of our first trustees came from.
It was decided that we definitely needed some people who
weren’t addicts. They could act as advisors. Most of
them were people who worked in social work. It was a good
exchange. They told us a lot of things we needed to do or
needed to train to do. We didn’t know anything. We
were a bunch of ragtags.
Q. How do you think NA has matured as a whole?
A. I think we’re more accepting of the fact that
there are people who can do the work. We’re very
businesslike; we’re in the mainstream. We
weren’t recognized in any stream for a lot of years.
We really didn’t get any recognition until the early
seventies.
Q. What happened then?
A. I think the growth started taking place—the
Northern California explosion, then Colorado, Australia,
England, Philadelphia…. People started finding out
that there was a place you could get clean and stay
clean. And the office became very important. Before we
got the office, we only had an answering machine and a PO
box. When the mail got answered depended a lot on who
went to the mailbox or who had the key.
Q. So that was the most centralized and stable thing we
had?
A. That was it. That was our World Service Office.
Q. The world in a box.
A. That’s what it was. I’d just carry stuff
around in my trunk until I caught up with someone who
could answer it.
Q. What do we still have left to do? Where do we still
need to mature?
A. We need to inform the fellowship [about world
services]. They have no idea what’s happening at the
World Service Conference. They have no idea why the
conference even exists.
DEBI S, CALIFORNIA
25 years
Q. So you got clean in 1973, right?
A. Right.
Q. How many NA meetings were there at the time?
A. Well, I went into a treatment center, so we went to NA
meetings, but there weren’t a lot of them, so the
treatment center had two NA meetings a week.
Q. In-house meetings? Were they open to all NA members?
A. Yes, the NA community came in and ran the meetings. So
that was the pool of people I got clean with—the
people who came to our meetings. They were also the
people you saw at all the meetings. We went to other
meetings. . . .
Q. It’s okay to say you went to AA.
A. I am going to say that. We went to a lot of AA
meetings because there were AA meetings everywhere, every
night, and NA was very young. [The treatment center] was
in West Los Angeles, so we would get in a car and travel
for an hour to some town called El Monte that I had never
been in before because that was where the other NA
meeting was. The was also a meeting in the Crenshaw area
and one in Hermosa Beach.
So that was it; that was our NA community. We didn’t
have three or four NA meetings a night to choose from. A
lot of times we didn’t have transportation, so we
had to go [somewhere] close by to get to a meeting, and
we went to a lot of AA meetings.
Q. I remember once you said at a speaker meeting that
your early recovery was in AA, and you asked if the
“purists” who had problems with that wanted you
to go out and start over.
A. Right. A lot of our old-timers had bad experiences in
AA in the early days, but I’m one of the ones who
had a totally, completely positive experience. [The
treatment center] would send carloads of us to meetings
in the clubhouses and the people loved us. I mean, here
was this carload of young newcomers, and they were, well,
to us they looked elderly, but they were probably the
same age I am today. They welcomed us; they wanted us to
come back, and they didn’t make a big deal about the
language. I can remember raising my hand and talking
about addiction and drugs. They just totally accepted us
and encouraged us. I just remember good, positive support
from going to those meetings.
Then of course there was the NA literature—there
wasn’t any. We had the White Booklet and that was
it. All of us used the AA Big Book and the Twelve and
Twelve. I feel I was very fortunate. I had a sponsor who
was into the Twelve Steps, Twelfth Step work, going to
hospitals, I mean every weekend.
Q. So there wasn’t much experience with the Twelve
Steps in the NA community at that time?
A. No, there wasn’t. But when we went to step
meetings that were AA-based, they were just filled with
information: basic how-to stuff, and personal experiences
about how to work the steps.
Q. Can a newcomer who’s coming into NA now get the
same kind of maturity that you had to go to AA to get?
A. [Long pause] Sometimes. I’m speaking for myself,
but when I came into the program, I didn’t know how
to judge these people or what kind of program they had,
and I wasn’t schooled in how to choose a sponsor.
They didn’t have IPs laying all over the place.
I’ve had conversations with others who have been
clean and around NA a long time, and one thing we’ve
all noticed is that when NA sort of “broke off”
formally from AA and we had our own book and our
language, there was a positive side to that but there was
also a negative side.
The positive side was the unity, the identification for
the newcomer. [If a newcomer] comes in and hears all this
different language from all these different
programs—it’s confusing.
Q. What was the negative side?
A. You lost a lot of the wisdom, a lot of the experience
that the older members of AA contributed to people like
me.
Q. Did we also lose NA members who left NA entirely to
sustain their recovery in AA?
A. There were a lot of NA members who resented [other NA
members] coming in and telling them they had to use this
new language. They were reading statements at all the
meetings about what [members] said. So they left and took
their recovery with them, and we’re talking about
people who had ten or fifteen years at the time.
I sort of took the position of not fighting anything. I
felt that I needed to stay in NA because of the women
that were coming in behind me. If all of us
bolted…I’d not only be cheating myself but the
new women that were walking in the door.
There were a lot of times I didn’t want to be here,
times when I was the only one in the meeting with five
years clean, or I was the only woman in the meeting.
There was this exodus that happened.
I don’t ever deny where I got my foundation.
It’s difficult sometimes, like when I’m
speaking in a meeting, one of the little sayings will
crop up or a reference to something that was so embedded
in me. At some point, I stopped worrying about it. I
can’t change my story. I can’t change where I
came from. Anyway, I worked with it.
Sometimes people would come to me, angry about what NA
was trying to push, and I tried to share with them that
NA was new and growing. These are people that are
fallible, that are going to make mistakes. If someone
says something to you that offends you, let it go, stay
here [in NA] and be that positive force for the newcomers
that walk through the door.
Q. Hasn’t a lot of that hostility blown
over—like if a newcomer shares in a meeting that
she’s clean and sober, there isn’t a lot of
hissing and booing?
A. Right. It went from one extreme to the other, and now
it’s kind of balanced out. I think people are more
reasonable about it.
I think about newcomers in treatment centers, and they
get taken to a different kind of meeting every night of
the week. They don’t know what’s going on. You
don’t want to humiliate them out of the room, but
that’s what was happening back in the early
eighties. That has stopped.
Q. So NA has grown up a little bit?
A. Yes, absolutely.
MELVYN B, AUSTRALIA
23 years
Q. What was your involvement in NA in Australia
when you got clean?
A. There was no NA at all.
Q. And you live in Melbourne, right? Was there anything
going on in Sydney?
A. There was and there wasn’t. There was a guy using
the NA name for his rehab center, and there was a lot of
controversy and starting and stopping.
The main start, I suppose, was in Melbourne. One of the
things I’ve found out about “historians”
is that they often miss out on what they don’t want
to hear or don’t like. I can tell you about how NA
got started here, but it’s not a rags-to-riches,
addict-was-desperate [story]. They were all clean members
of AA.
How I got involved was I was going to AA meetings, and I
ran across this book from Hazelden, and I thought,
“This is good. I wonder if they’ve got any
more.” So I wrote away to Hazelden about 1975. They
sent me a catalog, and inside the catalog were a couple
of [NA] things. There was the Little White Book, and
there was a guide to the family of the drug abuser.
Q. Was that from NA?
A. No, that was from Families Anonymous. Anyway, there
was a lot of stuff. I sent away for it, and it all came.
It caused a lot of controversy—it was unapproved
literature, it was this, it was that.
Anyway, about that time I got very sick and was diagnosed
with tuberculosis. I had to go in the hospital, and while
I was there I decided to become a volunteer alcohol and
drug counselor. Part of my training was to spend a day or
half a day at every [drug treatment] facility in
Melbourne. So I went around to all these places, and what
I discovered was that there was nothing for addicts who
wanted to stop using and there was nothing for parents
who wanted help for their pain. So with the literature I
had from Hazelden, I knew about NA and FA and I decided
to start them both. That’s when I wrote off to Jimmy
K. I got a lovely letter back with some encouragement
plus the literature that was available at that
time—which was quite good—The NA Tree and stuff
like that.
Q. How long did it take to get a response?
A. Oh, it was almost immediately.
Q. That’s great. Knowing how mail was answered at
the time, I’m pleasantly surprised.
A. Anyway, I was going around to AA meetings and at the
young people’s group here in Melbourne, I heard
others talking about drugs. I met [several people] and we
decided to get NA going. We’d heard about NA
starting and stopping in Sydney and we went to see a
couple who had been involved there. I looked for a place
to hold the meetings, and we found a place. What actually
happened was that Narcotics Anonymous and Families
Anonymous started within a week of each other at the same
place. And as far as I know that was the start of the
tradition-oriented NA that has been spread around
Australia.
Q. What year was that?
A. 1976. The interesting thing from my point of view is
that if I hadn’t gotten into counseling… I was
able to speak about my drug use at AA and so were the
others. In other words, I didn’t need NA to stay
clean and sober, and neither did they.
Then for me there’s always been a connection with
FA. That, of course, has caused anger and resentment in
other people who don’t like that historical
connection.
Q. Why do you think they don’t like it?
A. Well, if you want to get neurotic about the
traditions, talk to NA members, because there are a lot
of very uptight people around. How we’ve survived I
don’t know, because there’s certainly an
element of self-destruction in NA. Anyway, I’m
getting ahead of myself….
So that’s how it started. There were [seven of us]
and that’s how it stayed for a while. The first guy
who got clean and sober in NA was the best man at my
wedding.
Q. I like that.
A. Yeah. I got him to AA and he didn’t like AA.
Later on he got sicker and I took him to NA, and as far
as I know he’s been clean and sober ever since. He
started NA in Bendigo.
Q. What was going on in Sydney at the time? Nothing?
A. No. I think it was around about 1982 or ’83 that
we started having groups that were following the
traditions and getting stronger in Sydney.
Q. One thing I’m sure our readers would like to know
is how much NA has matured. You’ve told me some
things about how immature NA was then, what with the
traditions police on one end of the spectrum and people
at the other end who knew nothing about the
traditions….
A. That’s the way it is now. In the early days, it
was much better.
Q. How so?
A. It was just more relaxed. We had the basic outline of
what we needed to do and we were all trying to work for a
common cause, but as it got bigger, it had room for
people to be bloody-minded.
Q. In what areas do you think NA still has some growing
to do? Where do we still have problems?
A. Narrow-mindedness. Rigidity. Addicts coming along are
not going to accept that authoritative do-as-I-did,
go-to-meetings, read-the-book, work-the-steps attitude.
Q. Are you basically talking about certain NA members not
accepting people seeking additional help outside of NA
such as therapy or religion?
A. A perfect example is a cartoon I saw in the NA Way.
This woman was talking about finding [something else] and
the woman on the other end was getting more and more
worried.
Q. Right, that was the January 1998 issue.
A. I nearly wrote to you about it.
Q. Well, now you don’t have to because you’re
being interviewed for the magazine.
A. I thought the cartoon was shaming people who wanted to
do other things outside of NA. [That attitude] ultimately
causes divisiveness because it shows intolerance.
We’ve got to have respect for people. When we shame
them for doing something outside of a narrow point of
view, then we’re not respecting them. I mean, what
you published was the norm [in NA]. When I became a
full-time counselor, there was a lot of prejudice.
What’s more, I’m an atheist. That has caused
enormous problems for people—not for me as a
recovering person, but for others. Then I stopped going
to meetings. That was another problem because I got so
much shit at meetings and I was sending my clients to
meetings. They said you couldn’t stay clean without
going to meetings. Nonsense!
I bought all that when I was new. If you wanted to meet
someone who was gung-ho on meetings, steps, Twelfth Step
work, I was that person originally. I changed as time
went on. Now [I ask]: What is recovery about? What is the
sickness? What is within us that’s recovering? And
there’s more than one way to do that.
NA is always going to be reborn with new people maturing
within the fellowship and implanting their persona on it.
But what’s dangerous is the idea of “circling
the wagons”—outside is bad and inside is good.
I don’t believe addiction is a disease. That’s
absolute nonsense to me. For addiction to be named a
disease—that was useful in 1935 and 1953. It’s
useful now if you just want to get clean and not go any
further. You know yourself how many addicts get clean,
but are into other addictions.
Q. Or just don’t make any fundamental changes …
A. Exactly. Another [conflict I have with NA’s
philosophy] is that I don’t have a God. You take a
look at the steps and they have a real God-orientation. I
spend a lot of time counseling people to work through the
first three steps using their own higher self or whatever
so we can move on to the important steps: the fourth and
fifth.
But we keep treating this stuff as sacrosanct. This is in
the book, therefore it must be true. I helped write the
Basic Text, not just my story, but the stuff inside the
text itself. That was written by fallible human beings
who were writing what they could at that particular time.
Q. I was going to tell you that some of the new
literature, particularly the new Step Working Guides,
make mention of members using a set of principles at
their Higher Power or their own highest self.
A. That’s a good trend, but when you get in there in
the groups and people come in and they’re desperate
and they’re told, “This is what you have to
believe”—it’s very easy to propagandize
the old stuff. Older members stayed clean because they
had support from the fellowship, but that’s the
thing: You only get support if you follow the party line.
If you don’t, you’ll get condemned, you’ll
get ostracized. It happens to new people. It happens to
people like me. The love is not unconditional.
Q. So you think NA really needs some unconditional love,
then?
A. Yes, because that’s the thing that really heals.
DAVE F, PENNSYLVANIA
24 years
Q. What was NA like when you found it in 1974?
A. There was a local rehab here, and it was a very
enlightened rehab in that it opened its doors to addicts.
It treated alcoholics for five or six years, and in the
late sixties began treating addicts. The director
believed that the same principles that worked for
alcoholism would also work for addiction.
So there was NA on the ground at that time. There were
two NA meetings a week and there had been NA off and on
in Philadelphia, but mostly on since about 1969.
There’s a quick, interesting little story…
Q. Do tell.
A. It has to do with the importance of literature. An
addict from this area had gone to an AA convention in
California in 1969, and he met some people who said,
“Look, there’s NA out here.” And they
handed him one—one!—copy of the Little White
Book. He brought it back to the rehab and showed it to a
friend of his who was a therapist at the rehab and they
started an NA meeting. All they knew about NA was what
they got from the Little White Book.
Q. That was enough, I guess.
A. That’s right. And from that, people who went
through the rehab started meetings in their own
communities, so by the time I came in in January 1974,
there were about a half-dozen meetings in the Delaware
Valley, which is Philadelphia and the surrounding
suburban communities.
Also about that time—the late sixties, early
seventies—the drug problem was growing. A lot of
drug rehabs were starting to spring up that were modeled
more on the Synanon approach, which was therapeutic
communities [advocating long withdrawal from society]. A
lot of them never addressed the problem of alcohol in the
life of an addict.
Then here was this Little White Booklet and meetings that
made it very clear that alcohol was a drug. That was a
radical minority view at that time. There were rehabs
that, after you were there a year, would try to teach you
how to drink socially. They would take you out in the
evenings and try to show you how to have one or two
beers.
Q. We’ve come a long way. How about the Twelve
Traditions? Did the NA community in Philadelphia follow
them? Did you talk about them?
A. That’s a very interesting topic because everybody
went to AA. Nobody would have even attempted—it
would have been viewed as foolhardy and
half-stepping—to try to stay clean solely on NA
meetings. [NA members] simply didn’t have the clean
time. I remember my first home group. It was a big
meeting because it would have something like twelve or
fifteen people, and that’s really about all the
addicts that were going to NA.
Q. And that was a huge NA meeting in Philadelphia in
1974?
A. Huge. And there was someone down there who was rumored
to have three years. That was an extraordinary amount of
time. So we all went to AA, and that’s something
people in the fellowship today have a hard time
understanding. We read AA literature at the meetings.
So with the exception of our relationship with AA,
I’d say we followed the traditions. There was a
meeting in a treatment center, and [the staff] insisted
that addicts [from outside] have a urine test before
going to the meeting. So what we called the
“Intergroup” then voted not to support that
meeting because it was a violation of traditions.
Q. That’s a controversial issue even today.
A. But we never viewed ourselves as a “little
AA.” We had our own personality from the beginning.
We went to AA to learn spirituality and about the steps
from alcoholics who had more experience with them.
Q. Would you say that NA language played a role in
developing NA’s identity?
A. I don’t think so at all. We had a very clear
identity. We had our own activities. We had our own
Intergroup. We had our own public relations committee
trying to get the message out, I’d say even more
aggressively then than now. We had a hotline in
Philadelphia, and it rang in an addict’s home. So
I’d say the identity as a separate fellowship from
AA predated the whole focus on NA language. That
didn’t hit here until the early to mid-eighties.
Q. How did that affect the fellowship in Pennsylvania?
A. It caused a lot of problems. A lot of people who were
very involved in NA no longer go to NA because of it.
This wave of “correct-speak” drove people away.
But that wasn’t the first thing. We had a major
exodus when The NA Tree came down.
Q. Oh, really?
A. Yeah, it was disseminated in about 1977 after it was
passed out there in California. A lot of people were very
resistant. It turned out to be a minority, but it was a
strong, vocal minority who resisted adopting the service
structure that—we felt—was being foisted upon
us.
Q. What was your service structure before that?
A. Pretty much like AA’s. We had an Intergroup.
Q. I’m not sure all our readers are familiar with
AA’s structure, so would you elaborate on that a
little bit? What did Intergroup do? Did a representative
from every NA group go to an Intergroup meeting?
A. Yeah, and it was done really well. The meeting was
moved around to try to encourage interest from other
areas.
Q. That’s great. Did it provide any services?
A. Yeah, we had public relations. We had a literature
committee. We did our own literature here. As I
understand it, the First Step out in California read
“…powerless over our addiction” in the
early sixties, and it probably read that way in the
Little White Book that landed here in 1969. But somebody
here decided that it should be “…powerless over
drugs.” It was that way for quite a while, and it
became a real controversy here. Meetings were reading it
with “powerless over drugs,” and when The NA
Tree took hold, people went out to these meetings to tell
them they weren’t NA. Also, we were always trying to
contact California and we never got a response. There was
no viable fellowship in New York then. There was no
viable fellowship that we knew of anywhere else.
That’s when a lot of people who were instrumental in
early NA here just left.
But as many stayed as left, and they got their rewards.
It’s been tremendous to watch the growth of the
fellowship. It takes compromise. I will say that [the NA
language controversy] has tempered over the years. People
can come into meetings and talk any way they want without
causing a negative response.
Q. What else has changed?
A. Yeah, I’ll tell you something else you’d
never see in a meeting today. We had fifty-fifty raffles.
[Editor’s note: In a fifty-fifty raffle, tickets are
sold for a certain amount and the pot of money is split
between the organization conducting the raffle and the
person whose ticket is drawn.]
Q. In meetings!?!
A. Can you imagine trying to get away with that today?
There’d be a shoot-out.
Q. What other wild and crazy things did you do back then
that NA doesn’t do anymore?
A. Smoke in meetings. It was coffee, donuts, and
cigarettes at every meeting. Nobody gave any thought to
non-smoking meetings.
Q. What else?
A. People knew that if we wanted this thing to take off,
we needed newcomers. Somebody sick with their ears open
was a precious commodity. Also, relapse was viewed a
little differently then. One could almost get the feeling
that relapse today is just another day in recovery.
I’ve heard people say in meetings that relapse is
good and some other pretty absurd things. Relapse was
taken very seriously, and it was something to be avoided.
Q. Do you think that’s due to people coming in with
“higher bottoms” these days?
A. I don’t know. I think people are afraid to give
each other direction today. It’s not hip to tell
someone, “hey, you’re making a mistake.”
We’ve gotten to be this “we’ll accept
anything you do” thing, and that’s bullshit.
People need direction once in a while. The old-timers
when I came around would get in your face if they thought
you were doing something wrong. I was in a meeting a
couple of weeks ago, and this guy was sharing about how
alcohol wasn’t really a problem for him and he could
drink. I interrupted and said NA’s a program of
total abstinence and he really shouldn’t be sharing
here. People got upset with me for saying that.
Q. In your view, in what areas does NA still have some
growing to do? What’s the next step for NA?
A. I think we need to get the message of NA out to the
public again, in terms of getting our phone number and
meeting lists out there. Basically, I’m pretty happy
with the way things are. I love the interest in history
that’s occurring. I think the next big move is that
every region should record its history. I think the
conventions are great and incredibly well-organized.
Thank God so many addicts have the talent for putting
those things on.
I’d also like to see us recognize the NA Fellowship
in New York that existed back in 1949, 1950, etc. I have
a copy of the articles of incorporation of Narcotics
Anonymous filed in 1951. I also have an original copy of
“Our Way of Life—An Introduction to Narcotics
Anonymous,” published in 1951 in New York. I just
think we need to be more objective about our history. It
doesn’t diminish in any way the contribution of the
people in California. I owe my life to that Little White
Book ending up here on the East Coast. I don’t think
it diminishes Jimmy K one bit to talk about the
contributions of Danny C and Houston S. I think we should
explore the connection between the fellowships in
California and New York. There may have been some contact
between them.
Another thing I’d like to see is us somehow luring
back the people who may have been put off by the
intransigence of the mid- and late eighties. They have a
lot to give—and they also have a lot to get here.
You can get clean here and never walk into another
fellowship’s meeting today. I’ve seen it.
It’s that strong. It’s that big. We don’t
have to be afraid anymore that we’re going to
dissolve into some other fellowship. We’re not going
anywhere.
Back to the top of the document
 Main NA Way Magazine
Page
Main Publication Page
Return
to Home Page
|