JAILS, INSTITUTIONS, AND DEATH

Those of us who have found these ends wish to stop the insanity of repeating the same mistakes that have always ended in incarceration, or having our lives monitored or controlled by some agency. We have written this chapter in order to share our experience, strength, and hope. We can apply these principles and become acceptable, responsible members of our society. In time, through learning a new way to live, it becomes in many of our lives unnecessary for society to place or keep these restrictions on us. The power of labeling is great. Anonymity helps us escape these labels. We are identified with and in terms of our active addiction.

In our history, we discover that the need for a fellowship of people, who could relate to each other in terms of addiction, first became known when addicts in jail were exposed to Alcoholics Anonymous. Being unable to understand or relate to the problems of these individuals, the members of that fellowship saw the need and encouraged other addicts to attend these meetings. Thus, NA more or less as we know it today took root first behind the walls of a jail.

Jail has played a major role in the lives of many of our members, since that first meeting. In one way or another, our relationship to the ‘system’ has always been one of reality. Without a doubt, the one concept that causes most addicts problems early in our recovery is that or rigorous honesty. Who ever ended up in jail, prison, or probation by being rigorously honest? For most of us in active addiction, the work honesty was very much in our minds equal to the word self-destruction. If we ever told the truth, we were sure to suffer. Our lives were such that almost everything we did had to be kept a secret from someone and especially kept from anyone in authority. We stole, dealt drugs, and cheated even our closest friends. We did whatever we had to do in order to survive. Deception was a way of life, an important part of our survival. It was our primary defense in what we viewed as a world full of deception. Without it we could see no hope to survive at all. We were people living in a society we felt we could never be a part of. We knew that somehow we were different from the neighbors next door who would never speak to us as we passed them on the street or peeped at us through closed curtains. We lived in fear that everyone around us was out to get us in some way and the guilt of our method of survival drove us further away from others and deeper into isolation.

An aspect of addiction often debated is the ‘choice’ issue. There was significant debate about the line in the Basic Text, "we are not responsible for our disease . . ." and justifiably so.

If the 12 steps are worked successfully, the person working the steps will no longer be a victim of their disease or anything else. Therefore, many people with significant clean time took issue with the above-mentioned line, which tend to indicate a victim role. Perhaps the quote really says "for having our disease."

It is safe and completely reasonable to say we chose to use drugs; or did not choose to become an addict. The choice to use repeatedly led to physical addiction, but the mental form of psychosis that has come to be known as addiction is not a conscious choice. It is a physical transformation or state that is a result of conscious choices.

Why is the issue of choice important? Choice is the fundamental definition of humanity in the laws of nature. The Human Race is the only members of the natural environment that has free will, thus the ability to determine their own outcome or fate.

By the nature of our birthright we can choose and control our actions on a daily basis. When we chose to use, we broke the physical law of Cause and Affect. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is a physical law that is constant in the universe.

The offset behind the course of addiction is jails, institutions, death, or recovery. At the risk of being redundant, addiction results in jail, institutions, death, or recovery, in any combination, except death, of course, which is permanent.

Why would anyone choose to be an addict, to spend time locked up or internally to suffer isolation, desperation, and despair? They do not. They simply do not. However, having chosen to begin using, and then to have morphed into an addict, an important choice awaits addicts. It is simple jails, institutions, death, or recovery.

 The fact that you are reading this or listening to this implies that at least temporarily that you are choosing recovery.  Recovery is a lifelong journey that is never completed. It is an endeavor to live a spiritual life based on spiritual principles. These spiritual principles are also known as the Twelve Steps, which are referenced in this book.

Addicts did not choose to become addicts, they choose to get high which let to addiction. Addiction leads to jails, institutions, death, or recovery. None of these conditions is shameful. They are the natural effect of addiction. The jails, institutions, and death are not threats, they are simply consequences of the disease.

Before coming to NA, we could not make the connection between the drugs and lifestyle. How those things created the vicious cycle of pain and rejection we lived in. We could see no problem with living next door to a drug dealer and could not understand why others around us should be concerned with how we lived. If we had to prostitute or write bad checks, why should that concern someone in another part of town or an entirely different part of the world for that matter? If was our own business, and society forced us into living in the lies - or so we believed.

Our fight to hold on to or to regain control of our lives led us to reject many of the values society must maintain in order to function. Soon one door after another was closed to us - our friends, families, and then even strangers started to reject us because of the pain that they feared we would bring to them. Soon, we found ourselves outcasts to some degree or another either in reality or imagined. In either case, for us this was life. We viewed rules of any kind simply as an obstacle of our own survival. Laws were only society's way to keep us down, to put us in our place, a way to keep us separated from the rest of the world. Our creed became that laws were made to be broken - and break them we did. The place society had for us soon became jails and institutions, and for a few viewed as hopeless, death was deemed justifiable.

Within the confines of these facilities, we soon discovered we were at last united with those like ourselves. This is not to say that all addicts end up in jails or institutions, or that all people in jails and institutions are addicts. However, a common theme among many of us once we reach the meetings of NA is that many of us have experienced in some capacity, the powerlessness of society intervening into our lives and into our addiction. This may have come in the form of jail, probation, youth homes, treatment facilities, or mental institutions.

Many of us found that once we were there we found many others who were much like ourselves. They too felt alone and rejected. They too sought relief through the self-medication to the point of obsession. They too, had done many of the same things to survive that we had done.

In many cases, these facilities became our classrooms. We learned how others had experienced the same situations we ourselves often had to confront an obtained the knowledge of how they survived. We seldom questioned the fact that the methods described to us by our new peers and mentors were most often the same that had put them along side us, under a system we neither understood nor respected. We simply felt for once in our lives that at last there were those who understood our plight and were able to offer an explanation of it, if not answers to it. At last, we found where we could fit in. In some cases, we even felt justified in all our fear and deception. We learned a new way to live and honesty had no place in it. The insanity of our disease kept us repeating the same mistakes always expecting different results.

Our bottoms came at different stages. For some of us, our first brush with the law through a DUI was enough. For others, it took years of prison, parole, and probation. For some, it took the death of a close friend or perhaps a relative. We were eventually moved to the understanding that the ‘getting, using, and finding ways and means to get more’ might very well be connected to the fear and depression of being discovered for who and what we were. Soon, we discovered that perhaps through our obsession and compulsion to use we were in fact in the grips of what was described to us in meetings as the disease of addiction. Maybe, just maybe, we were addicts.

Some of us had already resigned to the idea years before we sought help. We used our disease as an excuse to continue in the self-destructive behavior with which we had grown so familiar. Sure, we were addicts. It made for a strong argument in court when we found ourselves facing the consequences of our actions. For others, the image of being an addict was so repulsive that we were unable to imagine the term ever applying to us or to our lives. To us an addict was a weak, sickly, disgusting excuse for a human being.

Some people share in meetings that they are not afraid that their next usage will kill them - they are afraid that it will break their momentum and that they will have to continue using, unable to stop. About all of us have been there.

While not funny in the humorous sense, some members fail to connect their pain and failure with their using. They think that they are just going through rough times. The trouble comes from the fact that they can rationalize their using even after abundant evidence of their addiction. They can lose money, friends, spouses, children, dogs, jobs, and self-esteem and still hold on to the idea that it isn't the using.

Many who have experienced recovery for a number of years are convinced that we tend to get here as our luck is running out. If we don't hold on to this chance, we may not get another one. While NA will welcome us back, we may suffer from ego conflicts, incarceration, or physical/mental illness that prevents our return to an open free life.

We may have rationalized that we were simply victims of life. We were born into bad luck and our only enjoyment was to be able to 'party' our problems away. We weren't "addicted" - we just "liked" getting high. Besides, in our experience, that's what everyone did. Like them, we deserved to get high. That didn't make us addicts. Besides, as soon as things got better, we wouldn't need to use so much. Who could blame us considering all we had gone through?

Yet, at some point as with all addicts the drugs stopped working. What then? Go on? Most of us had already reached jails or institutions at this point. Only two choices remained - either get better or die. We in the Fellowship of NA choose life at some point. Yet, our choice at first seemed almost as hopeless as our addiction. At first, all we could do was try to find ways and means to not use. To try and stay clean for one day, or at times, just one hour or one minute. We couldn't imagine a life without drugs, and yet we knew how our life with them would end.