Discovery! NA's First Pieces of Literature

Narcotics Anonymous - Our Way of Life (draft 1949)

"Many of us had tried treatments of medicine and psychiatry but were not cured of the disease.... Many of us have been jailed innumerable times... Many had gone or been sent to institution after institution, with the hope that at each... the cure would take place."

"What we did not clearly understand was that we were in the grip of an underlying illness that expressed itself in distortd thinking and drug addiction."

"The first and most essential step is Honesty (Personal honesty, intellectual honesty)."

"When we get to the place where we are ready to honestly admit that we are powerless to control our drug habits, we have taken one of the hardest yet one of the longest steps toward our recovery."

"Many of us are reluctant to make this admission, feeling that it is the acknowledgement of a personal weakness. We attempt to substitute alcoholic beverages for our addiction, or we change to some compensatory occupation... Some of us never get through trying old way that all lead to the same place - FAILURE."

"The idea that somehow, some day, should we do this or that, we will be able to control and enjoy our drug-taking is the great obsession... The persistence of this delusion is astonishing. Many pursue it into and through the gates of insanity and death."

"We must realize that we are in the grip of a progressive EMOTIONAL and PHYSICAL illness which... steadily grows worse, never better."

"We must realize that it is not the fourth or the tenth shot that brings our addictino back to life, but THE FIRST SHOT... that does the damage."

"Having achieved this state of intellectual humility, we are ready for the next step of recovery, we come to believe in a power greater than ourselves, or keep an open mind on the subject while we go on with the rest of the program. Any concept of the higher power is acceptable. The addicts labeled as a skeptic or agnostic may choose to think of his inner self; others will have different conceptions. Whatever form is visualized, we must rely on it and, in our own way, pray to that power for strength."

"We repeat: NA is not religious, but spiritual."

"None of us claims perfect adherence to these principles... we claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection."

Excerpt from 1955 booklet, Pages 3-4:

"We of Narcotics Anonymous are exactly like you. We are a group of addicts who meet regularly to help each other obtain arid maintain our sobriety and to stay clean.

Before coming on the program, our trouble was we could not manage our own lives. We couldn't live like normal people. We had to have something different and we thought we had found it in drugs and narcotics. We got so we had to have these drugs arid narcotics no matter what the cost. We placed their use ahead of the welfare of our families, wives and children. We did them great harm, but most of all, we harmed our selves. We broke not only the laws or society but the greatest law of all - the law of nature.

We were running away, that was our real problem, for the use of drugs and narcotics is but a symptom of underlying causes. We used in order to escape facing life and its problems. We realized we were slowly committing suicide, but such cunning enemies of life are drugs and narcotics that we had lost the power to do anything about it.

Jail did us no good. Medicine and psychiatry had no answers for us. Everything else having failed, in desperation we sought help from each other, in Narcotics Anonymous.

Here, we have come to realize we are not moral lepers. We are simply sick people. We suffer from a disease, just like alcoholism, diabetes, tuberculosis, heart trouble or cancer. There is no known cure for these diseases and neither is there for drug addiction."