Hugs Not Drugs

The Observer, Sunday, July 27, 2003

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

'I was a typical middle-class junkie,' a 38-year-old called John L 
says. 'Nice family, public school, good at presenting a mask to the 
world.' He started with cannabis and glue, and got into coke when he 
was 22. His job took him to clubs a lot, so scoring was easy.
As a child, John felt on the outside of things. At school he had a 
sense of low self-worth, a feeling that continued into his twenties. 
But he had a good job with some glamour and believed himself to be 
one of those people who functioned well on cocaine. 'The one thing 
an addict never wants is anyone getting between them and their 
drugs,' he explains. 'So if anyone would ever suggest that I was 
maybe using too much I'd blank them out and try not to see them. If 
any old friends cleaned up I would cut them from my life because I 
was terrified of them.'

He hung on to his job throughout the 80s. 'I was doing enough coke 
to make me feel extremely paranoid and go on some massive downs. I 
used to use all night, felt terrible waking up in the afternoon, 
think about suicide briefly or calling an ambulance, but then I had 
a can of lager and I'd start feeling a bit better and think: "Ah 
well, I'll just see if one of my dealers is in..."' John had heard 
that addiction was often talked of as an illness of insanity and a 
good definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes but 
expecting different results.

His life collapsed in his mid-thirties. He was fired from his job 
and felt he was going nowhere. The drugs had become the only 
constant. He attended a residential treatment centre, believing he'd 
be out in three weeks. It took three months. 'I came out probably 
just as gibbering as when I went in, but the great difference was 
that I knew I was an addict, and that if I wanted to stay clean I 
had to get to a meeting and not stop going to meetings.'

The meetings to which he refers are those of Narcotics Anonymous, an 
organisation 50 years old this month. Meetings occur each day 
throughout the world - there are about 500 a week in the UK. 
Occasionally, Naomi Campbell or a famous actor will turn up and be 
caught on camera, and NA will be in the news for a day or two - 
something it doesn't enjoy. As its name suggests, it prefers 
obscurity and doesn't promote its meeting in schools and church 
halls, nor its proven method of recovery from all forms of chemical 
addiction. It calls itself a fellowship and it is a unique and 
seemingly indestructible one. There is no leadership hierarchy, no 
restrictions on membership with regard to class, religion, age or 
sexual preferences, no membership fee and no political allegiance or 
direction. Accordingly, it is a place of great possibilities and it 
offers what no professional treatment regime or detox centre can - 
the principle of one addict helping another.

Narcotics Anonymous grew out of Alcoholics Anonymous, drug users 
believing that their experiences required a more specialised, 
tailored environment. The central tenet of NA was also adapted from 
AA - the 12-step self-help programme. This schedule, to be conducted 
at the addict's own pace over a period of several months and often 
years, defined the road to spiritual recovery. No addict could ever 
consider themselves cured by the steps, for it has always been a 
core belief of the fellowship that one remains an addict throughout 
life. But the steps show a path for improvement. They are composed 
in the past tense, emphasising a sense of history and proportion, 
and suggesting that many addicts have already used the programme 
successfully. Step One: 'We admitted that we were powerless over our 
addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable.' Step Two: 'We 
came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us 
to sanity.' Step Four: 'We made a searching and fearless moral 
inventory of ourselves.' Step Eight: 'We made a list of all the 
persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them 
all.' Step 12: 'Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of 
these steps, we tried to carry this message to addicts, and to 
practise these principles in all our affairs.'

In most cases, the 12 steps are a culmination of a greater struggle, 
the attempt to achieve what the old-timers in NA call '90 in 90' - 
attending a meeting every day for three months while remaining drug-
free. A gargantuan task and newcomers are encouraged to take it 
slowly or, in the 60s parlance of much of NA's literature, 'give 
yourself a break'. If you can stay drug free ('stay clean') for 20 
minutes, then you can make it to an hour, then maybe three hours, 
then a day and another meeting. Initially, the meetings provide the 
focus for each day's struggle - locating the nearest one, travelling 
to it, feeling a sense of achievement after it - and consistently 
they offer the sole purpose of an addict's life. Above all, they 
suggest that no one should suffer alone.

'One of the easy criticisms is that we're just swapping one 
addiction for another and now we're addicted to meetings,' John L 
told me. 'My answer is that I know which addiction I'd prefer. I'm 
not going to cause any damage to people at meetings and meetings are 
a lot cheaper.' He has been clean for 13 years. When he put his 
drugs down, he says, he was left with a gaping hole in his life and 
NA replaced the drugs with spirituality. It also provided a great 
social life. 'That was never its intention,' he says. 'But when you 
first go you realise that you do have to make a whole new set of 
friends.

I wasn't going to be with my old user friends, because they say that 
if you hang around the barber shop long enough you're going to get a 
haircut.'

At every NA meeting a poster listing the 12 steps is displayed on a 
wall, usually near another poster displaying the 12 traditions, the 
closest the fellowship has to a constitution. These have provided a 
sense of continuity over the years, and have ensured a degree of 
autonomy from external pressures and internal spats. The traditions 
state that NA should not endorse or finance any outside enterprise 
and should be self-supporting, declining contributions from anyone 
who isn't a member. And they emphasise the importance of anonymity 
when dealing with the media, 'ever reminding us to place principles 
before personalities'.

'When I first came to a meeting I thought they were all a bunch of 
nutters,' a man called Andy told me. 'But I was intrigued about them 
being clean, because I hadn't met any clean addicts and they were 
talking about their feelings. My previous experience of addiction 
was loneliness, isolation and fear.'

Andy started going to meetings on 1 March 1984, by which time NA was 
in its fifth British year (like most recovering addicts, he 
remembers the date as if it was a birthday). His first meeting was 
in a Portakabin near a treatment centre in Primrose Hill and he 
remembers feeling jealous. 'There were all these addicts who were 
laughing and joking and I wanted what they had. By that stage I had 
tried weird religions and yoga and meditation, and I had done the 
traditional clinic detox and nothing had worked. I remember at one 
meeting there was this guy who turned up from Manchester who was six 
years clean and we just fell at his feet. He had begun his clean-up 
at AA meetings. At that time there was no one in London who was six 
years clean.'

When Andy began speaking at the meetings, his story was not 
unfamiliar to those present. 'I've met loads of addicts who come 
from very happy, functional families, but I wasn't one of those,' he 
told me. 'My dad committed suicide when I was one, and by the age of 
10 or 11 I was already smoking and drinking. I'd been to see a child 
psychiatrist.

I had a lot of problems at school and was bullied. So when that 
first drug hit, I was ready for it.'

His brother, four years older, became a heroin addict and Andy took 
everything else - glue, amyl nitrite, dope, speed, coke, booze. Not 
long before his 17th birthday he checked into a psychiatric unit, 
where he had very bad panic attacks and dealt with a prolonged 
mental breakdown. He was back on drugs as soon as they let him out.

His brother cleaned up first, and introduced him to NA. 'I was there 
at the moment it exploded,' he says, recalling new meetings all over 
London and university towns. The first weeks were hellish, but 
things did improve. 'After about two months we used to go clubbing 
every Friday. We were the weirdest group of clubbers out there - the 
only ones not using or drinking. All your feelings come back at that 
stage, all your emotions of rage and love and lust, so we were all 
as horny as hell, but too nervous to chat anyone up. It was like a 
very delayed adolescence.'

Andy told me he has enjoyed huge changes in his life - marriage, two 
children, a house and job - but also grief. In the early 90s his 
brother and his brother's wife died of HIV. 'For me it's about 
helping other people now, because when I was taking drugs my whole 
existence was about taking everyone for everything I could get and 
ripping them off. The primary purpose is to carry the message to the 
addict who is still suffering, because the newcomer is always the 
most important person in the room.'

The room just off the King's Road in Chelsea is a school hall, 
adorned with the usual paintings of flowers and butterflies. On a 
Monday at the end of June, 45 people have assembled at 6.15pm to 
hear a man called Dick say, with a marked weariness in his 
voice, 'My name is Dick and I'm an addict.'

Dick, performing his last weekly duties after a year as chairman, is 
at a small table at the front of the room seated next to a guest 
speaker. Behind him hang curling posters of the 12 steps and 12 
traditions. To his left is a table serving tea and water and to his 
right another with NA literature, including a yellow leaflet 
titled 'Am I An Addict?' This contains a tick-box questionnaire: 'Do 
you ever use alone? Has using affected your sexual relationship? Do 
you put the purchase of drugs ahead of your financial 
responsibilities?' Ahead of Dick and his guest is a display of 
keyrings in bright colours.

Everybody in the room - which is roughly two-thirds male and has an 
average age of perhaps 35 - says, 'Hi Dick!' in unison. Dick 
explains that the meeting will be an hour long and anyone displaying 
abusive or threatening behaviour will be asked to leave. He then 
turns to a woman in front of him and says, 'Annie, what is NA?'

'NA is a non-profit fellowship or society of men and women for whom 
drugs had become a major problem.' Annie reads from a stained sheet 
of plastic-coated paper that Dick had given her a few minutes 
before. She reads for a minute more, explaining that the meetings 
are for everyone and can help you stay clean. 'We are not interested 
in what or how much you used or who your connections were.' Then 
there are more readings, all taken from the Narcotics Anonymous 
Basic Text, a 290-page manual now in its fifth edition and 48th 
printing. The readings answer such questions as: 'Why are we here?' 
and 'Who is an addict?' 'Most of us do not have to think twice about 
this question,' another reader answers. 'We are people in the grip 
of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the 
same: jails, institutions and death.'

Then everyone in the room introduces themselves, many stating their 
clean-time. I'm Peter and I'm an addict, four years, three months. 
Hi Peter! I'm Carol and I'm an addict, 45 days. Hi Carol! I'm Joel 
and I'm an addict, six days. When this is over, it is time for the 
guest speaker. Three weeks before, the recovering wife of a famous 
rock star had taken this spot, which in the run of these meetings is 
neither here nor there. What matters is inspiration, an ability to 
convince those having a terrible time in the room that there are 
better days ahead. A man called Carl, who looks like a rugby player, 
does this with conviction and humility, and he tells a traditional 
tale of the joys of early usage and the degradation that followed. 
He emphasises the importance of helping other addicts with less 
faith in recovery. He uses a phrase that has become an NA 
mantra: 'You only keep what you have by giving it away.'

When he finishes, the meeting is opened to those with clean-time of 
less than a year. There is no shortage of speakers, some of them 
sweating, some confident, some mumbling. They are mostly having a 
very bad time. One man who has been drug-free for a month speaks of 
how unmanageable everything became last week when his girlfriend had 
an abortion; he was desperate for a drink, he says, but that would 
have lead to other things (abstaining from alcohol is a cornerstone 
of NA recovery). A man in his twenties says he arrived from a 
treatment centre in South Africa a few days ago and is finding it 
almost impossible not to buy again. A woman who has been clean for 
two months says she recently received a mobile phone call from a 
dealer unaware of her recovery. 'I found it impossible to delete his 
name from my callers' list. I had to have a friend do it. 
Subconsciously I was thinking maybe I'll need him.'

After 20 minutes, those with more clean-time begin to speak and the 
mood changes. Their voices are louder and their emotions are less 
raw. Their contributions contain some neat phrases. One person 
speaks of his desire to 'keep to the middle of the bed, not the edge 
where I might fall off'.

I am sitting next to a man called Peter who tells an alarming and 
comical tale of getting clean in Esher, Surrey, nine years ago. He 
started smoking crack cocaine in northeast Scotland in the 80s when 
he worked in the booming fishing industry. 'I got caught sneaking 
into port with non-quota fish. So I sold my boat when I was 35 and 
the drugs took over. I squandered everything I had - a five-bedroom 
house, sports car...' The turning point came when the drug squad 
pulled up the floorboards of his mother's house.

'I knew a guy who had run a small airline in Aberdeen who also took 
a lot of cocaine. I'd bought drugs off him before and he now lived 
in Surrey.

I called him at about five in the morning one day, completely off my 
head and knowing that he was usually the same. He said, "Please 
don't phone me again at this time, as I'm getting clean," and he 
told me about NA, which I'd never heard of before.' Peter went down 
to Surrey to see this guy. 'After years of cocaine he was going 
crazy. He had shaved off his eyebrows and was wearing big furry 
slippers outside and he thought he was the Messiah.'

After several weeks in meetings, Peter began doing 'service', which 
initially involves making tea or stacking chairs and leads on to 
becoming a greeter of newcomers and perhaps treasurer or secretary. 
Service is an essential part of recovery and often takes the form 
of 'sponsoring' a new member by becoming their advisor, usually on 
the end of a phone at desperate times. Those with a lot of clean-
time often have several sponsorees, and are in much demand.

At the end of the hour, Dick holds elections for a secretary for the 
coming year and initiates a collection to pay for the hire of the 
room. He then announces for the last time that 'at NA we celebrate 
clean-time with claps and hugs', and Carl begins handing out 
keyrings amid much applause. 'Anyone here been clean for a day?' he 
asks. A young woman walks up to collect a white keyring. She clasps 
it in her hand; I have never seen anyone hold anything so small with 
such relief. 'Thirty days?' Carl asks. Someone else collects an 
orange one, a plastic pear-shaped fob with a rope design on the 
edges and on the back the phrase 'Clean and serene for 30 
days'. 'Sixty days?' Green. 'Ninety days?' Red. Six months is blue 
and a year is moonglow.

At the end, everyone gets up to stand in a huge circle and hold 
hands as if it is time for Auld Lang Syne. They say: 'God, grant me 
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change 
the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.' And then 
the meeting is over, and there is a choice of where to gather 
tomorrow: Kilburn, Soho, Bethnal Green, Highbury, Waterloo, 
Tottenham, Crouch End, Earl's Court, Hampstead, Willesden, Stockwell 
or Twickenham. Or there is Bristol, Slough, Amersham, Camborne, 
Carlisle, Plymouth, Bournemouth, Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, 
Glasgow, Sheffield, Bangor, Sunderland, Norwich, Brighton, Bury-St-
Edmonds and several others.

In San Diego, 25,000 people who really should be dead by now 
gathered along the bay earlier this month to acknowledge the fact 
that drug addicts do recover. This was Narcotics Anonymous's 30th 
world convention and 50th birthday celebration, a four-day 
extravaganza of concerts by KC and the Sunshine Band and BB King, 
trips to Sea World and San Diego Zoo, midnight cruises and comedy 
shows, workshops and exhibitions.

The scale of the event was best witnessed at the Merchandise 
Ballroom, a hangar in the convention centre that on Friday morning 
opened for business with 25 different NA product lines and by 
Saturday lunchtime had only 10 left. You could buy five different NA 
mugs and a pair of espresso coffee cups, three types of notebook, a 
vast array of T-shirts, fleeces, leather jackets and fridge magnets, 
all with various logos and slogans, the most common of which was: 'A 
simple way has been proving itself'. The queues to enter were so 
long that people were given colour-coded wristbands in the atrium 
with a dedicated shopping time and encouraged to come back at their 
allotted hour.

While waiting you could browse the glass cases containing NA 
souvenirs from all over the world, including clean-time key rings 
from Israel, Korea, India, Japan and Peru. 'We're all trinket 
junkies,' a man called Ron told me, explaining that one of the 
earliest NA books now changes hands for $1,500. Ron, a computer 
technician who had been drug-free for 24 years, was a volunteer on 
the World Service board responsible for co-ordinating relations 
between the international fellowships. He told me of his drugs days 
in Fargo, North Dakota, and took me through a timeline of NA's 
development. The early star of the show was Jimmy K, who, with five 
friends, established the first meeting in Sun Valley, a suburb of 
LA, in July 1953. Growth was slow, and many drug users feared the 
meetings were a police stakeout. In 1959 the fellowship almost died 
after some members relapsed and others disagreed over policy - the 
12 traditions were established not long after. The organisation 
gradually took a foothold: in 1979 there were fewer than 200 groups 
in three countries; in 1993, 60 countries had more than 13,000 
groups; today, 106 countries have 20,000 registered groups holding 
about 30,000 weekly meetings, many of them in hospitals and 
institutions.

It is quite impossible to sum up the sort of people attending the 
San Diego convention, other than to say that every wash of human 
life was there. Parents brought very young children. Sixteen-year-
old girls brought themselves. Elderly people had all sorts of 
walking supports. A survey conducted at the last convention in 
Atlanta produced a reliable demographic of its members: 55 per cent 
were male; 49 per cent were white and 39 per cent African American; 
75 per cent were in full-time employment; the mean average of clean-
time was 7.2 years; 11 per cent were aged 21-30, 32 per cent were 31-
40 and 41 per cent were 41-50. Asked to name their drug of choice, 
26 per cent of respondents chose crack cocaine, 21 per cent cocaine, 
20 per cent opiates such as heroin, 10 per cent cannabis, 10 per 
cent hallucinogens and the rest barbiturates (many, of course, used 
more than one substance). The survey was repeated this year and 
asked whether members also attended any other meetings. Overeaters 
Anonymous? Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous? Al-Anon or Nar-Anon (for 
families and friends)? Emotions Anonymous?

Ron told me that after 50 years there were still discussions about 
the appropriateness of the name. 'The problem is,' he said, 'an 
alcoholic is a person, but a narcotic is not a person.' Technically, 
a narcotic is a drug that induces sleepiness, but at NA the name now 
means far too much to too many people to ever be changed.

Aside from the big concerts and outings, the main business of the 
convention took place in bland meeting rooms. Groups 
discussed 'Intimacy in Recovery', 'The Lost Art of the 12th Step 
Call' and 'The Basic Text - Are We Ready For a Sixth Edition?' There 
were specific meetings on how best to tackle each step. Relief from 
these could be found in the form of Rocky Recovery and the Self-
Obsessions, a burlesque blues show from a 12-piece all-addict 
British band. The band played in a room at the Marriott Hotel and 
after the show the audience was encouraged to sign a large white 
sheet from Her Majesty's Prison, Coldingley, Surrey. 'Recovery is 
happening at our unit,' it read, and people supported this with 
personal messages. 'Hugs not drugs... Love across the sea... Love 
yourself... It works if you work it.'

Most people agreed that the highlights occurred at the keynote 
meetings held in the evenings in a vast hall that had most recently 
been host to shoe and chair salesmen. Unlike the smaller gatherings, 
these had a stage design, big screens and impressive sound systems. 
It was like attending a rock concert and there were huge cheers when 
the lights dimmed and the host for the event said, in studied 
actorly tones, 'I'm Michael and I... am... an... addict!'

Talking to British NA members who had attended these kind of things 
before, I had been told to prepare myself for much whooping and 
hollering, and I was not disappointed. It was impossible for someone 
on stage to break wind without receiving rapturous acclaim. But I 
was also deeply moved by the tales of courage and devotion that had 
brought people here. At its heart, the convention was a celebration 
of reclaimed lives. One meeting featured Ahmed Al H from Kuwait, 
Brut K from Japan, Fernando S from Costa Rica, Nors M from Singapore 
and Yunia B from Switzerland. Monica A from Norway spoke of being 12-
stepped in Ibiza by two people who told her later that they thought 
she was too far gone to recover. 'After that I decided to go back to 
Norway and clean up my country. Hardly anybody came to the first 
meetings. I was sharing my experience with this one guy and he fell 
asleep and I was so offended. But I was a member of NA even if I was 
alone and it meant everything to me.'

Ahmed Al H, who fancied himself something of an entertainer, said 
that at first he thought NA was a programme that only worked for 
Americans. But he set up a group in Bahrain with another man. 'We 
hated each other. I mean badly. We fight in NA, we swear, we do lots 
of bad things that I am ashamed even to share with you now, but my 
God when I see this guy coming into the meeting when I'm sitting 
there alone, I feel so good.' He then established meetings in Saudi 
Arabia and translated some of the literature. 'It booms,' Ahmed Al H 
said.

Outside the main hall, a man garlanded in hibiscus handed out bags 
with details of the next world convention in Honolulu in September 
2005 and people took the information with great resolve.

'Do you know about the 13th step?' a woman known as Mary P asks me 
back in London. 'That's the one where you sleep with a newcomer.'

Mary P is an old hand at Narcotics Anonymous, having first attended 
a meeting at Chelsea in 1981 and setting up what she thinks was only 
the third NA meeting in the country, in Weston-Super-Mare, later the 
same year. 'We went on a recruiting drive and opened meetings 
everywhere, but we were fairly clueless,' she says. 'Reliant on 
scraps of information from America. There wasn't a great deal of 
experience, strength and hope.'

Her addiction was another case of middle-class anomie and boredom. 
She came from Hertfordshire; she doubts whether her parents had ever 
seen a joint. She was a model for a while before her liking for 
alcohol at Bristol University ruined her figure. At the time of punk 
she entered 'the golden triangle' of three pubs at the end of the 
King's Road, and snorted her first heroin in the toilet of the 
Fulham Road cinema. 'It was like, "Why didn't someone tell me 
before?" I thought I'd discovered the meaning of life. I just felt 
like I'd always wanted to feel. Then I got an ex-boyfriend to teach 
me how to fix. Shooting up was obviously the best way to take it. 
But I was a very bad junkie - my arms were a battlefield.'

She stole from her family, who fixed her up with expensive clinics. 
Her father offered to buy her a bottle of champagne every day if 
she'd stop sticking needles into herself. When a friend first 
mentioned NA she said she'd like to go, but she had already arranged 
to score.

But she did go, eventually, and her clean-time lasted five years. 
She relapsed after a nervous breakdown brought on by her job and 
other pressures and used again for another four. 'I thought I 
couldn't possibly go back to NA after my relapse - just too 
ashamed,' she said. 'But of course that wasn't an issue.' The 
difference between the first time and the second was that the second 
time she worked the 12 steps, and she believes you have to go 
through them to understand yourself.

She has now been drug-free for 13 years. 'NA is not for everyone,' 
she says. 'It doesn't have a monopoly on recovery. And I don't like 
everyone who goes to the meetings. But I wouldn't be here without it 
and nor would many of my friends.' I ask her what she would change 
about the fellowship and without pausing she says that there is 
nothing at all.

· The UK website for NA is www.ukna.org.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003