HISTORY AND ORIGINS

Much time and energy has been spent in researching and documenting our origins. Danny Carlson in the late Forties and Jimmy Kinnon in the early Fifties surely played a role. Yet isn't it obvious that NA is still being ‘founded’ today? Jimmy K. called himself a co-founder because he realized that we're all in this together. No single person is responsible for anything that happens in NA. Much of the recovery process is about getting away from seeing ourselves as separate and apart from our fellow recovering addicts. None of us wants to take the credit for God's miracle. Nearly everyone who reads this material has played some role in founding their local Fellowship. We're all founders and the only important thing about this is our gratitude and the experience that we have to share with others. The power of a loving God has found a way for us to stay alive long enough to get the basics of recovery. NA began when the first two addicts seeking recovery got together and found they could stay clean through their common desire. Only God knows where and when this occurred. Many say, "If NA didn't exist, someone would have to invent it." This is what happened again and again. Some had ties with other efforts and some did not but they all deserve our respect and gratitude. If we go back far enough, we will find the future and the means to change it. Perhaps it is easier to see the principles when we don't know the personalities.

Recently, another name has been added to the list of those who played key roles in the early days. This is Houston Smith from Montgomery, Alabama. He went north to Lexington, Kentucky to see what could be done about carrying a message of recovery utilizing the ‘new Twelve-Step method.’ As of yet, we are unaware that anyone has come forward and claimed to have been the founder of what we know today as Narcotics Anonymous. Many, many members have played a role in the founding NA as we know it. This structure may seem to lack the clarity that ‘a fearless leader’ could give us. The blessing is that we also lack many of the limitations that are incumbent with individual leadership. Somehow, we get what we need - when we need it. God always seems to be on time.

Writing about any history is in some ways an exercise in writing speculative fiction. There will always be the problem of sketchy and uncertain facts. Interpretation will limit the perception of historical events for people who didn't live the experience. Even among actual participants, honest disagreements of recollection and viewpoint will occur. Those involved in the wonderfully complicated process of our evolution from using to regaining health and being more human will have different views on the same event. If this were to be simply an evolution of events, it would be simple to write and quickly accomplished. There is, however, a story that is more demanding. We hope that we have captured some of the difficulty as well as the excitement of the birth and growth of the largest source of help for the drug addict on the planet today.

Bill Wilson and Bob Smith originated the Twelve Steps. We owe them a deep debt of gratitude for having the courage and vision to formulate a recipe for recovery. We have used their recipe with our own ingredients and we share a cake that we baked ourselves in our own kitchen with our own ingredients. If our methods had failed to keep us clean, there would be no question of founders. We would find it hard to ask these questions from our graves. Certainly, we need our sense of integrity and we have paid an awesome price to stand on our own as ‘a program of recovery from addiction.’ The long hard struggle for addicts to be able to live clean lives began some time ago and many good people paid a part of the price which has resulted in our being able to live clean today. That is of importance to many of us. More than anything else, we are grateful to these men and women. They endured struggles that we can only imagine. A handful of them may still be alive today but many have probably died feeling like their contribution was in vain! They had problems such as being arrested as they walked out of the door after a meeting as well as strong support from a few but indifference from the many. They have each made a contribution which encouraged others to carry on and helped them do so.

From the earliest of times, the members of NA have had to fend for themselves. Against the pitfalls of addiction, we have had to provide for our needs. We have photocopied material and done everything within our power to make our message available to addicts though writing, personal visits, and any other methods available. There has never been a serious instance of intrusion from the outside. With our Twelve Steps in place for twenty years by the early Seventies, we have to wonder why it took so long to grow. One possible explanation is because personal initiative is somehow bound to be egotistical. What kind of egotism is it to criticize someone that is trying to help? Without willing instruments, even God must wait. Fear of personal criticism should not be allowed to block our way. Even today with all the growth and progress in NA, we sometimes have to wait for a long time for some simple needs to be met.

There were addicts trying to stay clean through the Twelve Steps in the early Forties. There were efforts to form something called Narcotics Anonymous as early as 1948. There are Saturday Evening Post articles on NA from the early Fifties. There are mentions of these efforts in several books and magazine articles. Brigadier General Dorothy Berry of the Salvation Army apparently played a strong supportive role to help meetings get started in New York City. Some of the earliest meetings were in Lexington, Kentucky at the Federal Institution there. There were meetings in Louisiana also. Early meetings took place in Cleveland, Ohio and parts of eastern Pennsylvania. In 1953, there was an effort to start a new meeting in faraway Sun Valley, California.

All these meetings were noteworthy. All played a role and none can judge with certainty which were 'better' than others. We can't even agree on meetings today! What works for some, may not work for others. What worked then was definitely different from what works today. The miracle is that the effort was made. In the Fifties, a man named Cy Melas was active along with Jimmy K. and others. Cy was in touch with the NA back East in Lexington and New York. These meetings may have survived in Eastern Pennsylvania or they may have died out. There were conflicts. Eyewitnesses give accounts of addicts being arrested leaving NA meetings. Other relate stories of addicts going to other Fellowships, having to sit in the back of the room for years, and never being allowed to share.

An early form of the White Booklet was printed in the early fifties, perhaps 1954. This was our literature until well into the early seventies. No known literature has survived from the Eastern meetings except for a newsletter publication called the Key from the meetings at Lexington. In 1959, there was a week or two when no known meetings took place. This is actually one of the most significant things in our entire history because it triggered basic change. No more could anyone say it would work out on its own. A few members took personal responsibility and the results have been continuous meetings since then. Personal responsibility, sharing our experiences in recovery from our disease, and the willingness to do our part to help make it better for others are probably the three big building blocks for our entire Fellowship. In the middle sixties, the White Booklet was expanded and stories were added to the back section. We were called a ‘hip pocket program’ because you could get our entire written message in your purse or back pocket.

The Parent Service Board was formed in the sixties to insure that there would never be a time when NA ceased to meet again. By the end of the Sixties, this Board had changed its name to the ‘Board of Trustees.’ In 1970, there were 20 known meetings in the world. The World Service Office (WSO) was in Bob B.'s home downstairs and was later moved to the trunk of a car. After that, it found it's address for the Seventies in a side room of Jimmy K.'s home. The members of the Board of Trustees agreed to pay some on the rent but Jimmy K. bore most of the burden himself. The World Convention was held in 1971 in Southern California.. It has continued to meet since then annually. Much of the early ‘business of NA’ was dealt with at the World Convention. In 1996, the World Convention went to a two-year rotation. Today, our 'business' is dealt with at a yearly World Service Conference and at quarterly meetings.

Terrific growth marked the Seventies and the Eighties. In 1973, work began on what would become the NA Tree, our first service structure. This was approved by the Board for use in 1975. In 1976, the first meeting of the World Service Conference (WSC) was held at the World Convention in Southern California. Its first act was to approve the NA Tree as its structural document. Several members have pointed out the humorous irony of the Conference approving the document that created it. In 1977, the second World Service Conference was held at the World Convention in San Francisco, California. Only one Regional Service Representative (RSR) showed up for the Conference, the one from Southern California. The RSR from Northern California didn't make it. There were only those two regions at the time. Members showed up from Texas and Atlanta and the World Convention began to move all around the country until it began to be held overseas. The next World Convention was held in Houston, Texas. The WSC continued to meet in Southern California, near Sun Valley.

The WSO continued to grow. Thousands of recovering addicts from around the country began to get the phone number and whenever there was a new meeting or trouble, a call went to Jimmy K., now the WSO manager. In the middle Seventies, there were two hundred meetings in the world. Work on the Basic Text grew out of the WSC and the general interest from the growing Fellowship. The new service structure allowed a 'correct' way for members to get involved with risking relapse which sometimes followed excessive personal involvement with projects. The first World Literature Conference was held in Wichita, Kansas. It produced the Handbook for NA Literature Committees which was approved by the 1980 WSC. Input was collected and processed in open participatory Literature Conferences. The sites of these conferences were: Wichita, Kansas; Lincoln, Nebraska; Memphis, Tennessee; Santa Monica, California; Warren, Ohio; Miami, Florida; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Monthly letters went to a list of participants which grew to include two thousand NA members. These members who wrote the Basic Text also founded thousands of meetings all over the Fellowship. They backed up the structure and the structure backed them up. The book was approved in 1982 as the result of a ‘motion to approve’ made by the RSR from Las Vegas, Nevada. It was published as a hardback in 1983 and presented at the WSC. By the end of the decade, over one million copies had been sold. The number of meetings swelled to over twenty thousand.

The publication of our Basic Text allowed for a revolution of immense importance to our young Fellowship. Suddenly there was money in World Services, a lot of money. This put a pressure on those entrusted to serve us at the world level in two ways. There was more to do and more to do with, yet the scale was balanced by the problems of money, property and prestige that were no longer a matter of program rhetoric. An office that grossed less than ten thousand dollars the year before the literature movement began in 1979, was now bearing the strain of millions of dollars. The strain alone created problems. They say there is a blessing in every difficulty and a curse in every blessing. Certainly our radical, accelerated growth resulted in some painful disillusionment. Too often, personalities pushed aside principles to get in on the action. The emptiness of these apparent victories is vivid in hindsight. Those who did not give way to the fear and justifications of the moment are still with us today while others fell by the wayside. If you ever feel these strains, start talking about them with your sponsor and home group. The fresh air of discussion usually kills the fungus of self-will when it starts to make us believe that we run the show!

Hiring people to replace volunteer workers at strategic points of service created the potential for conflicts that were not foreseen or thought of as being possible by the leadership at the time. These professionals should be trained to avoid conflicting with Fellowship procedures. This period of discomfort ended with the failure of a new effort to write a book on the Steps and Traditions. It was called It Works: How and Why and went out to the Fellowship for approval in the Mid-eighties. The task of writing had been turned over to a professional by the WSO which was against the existing policies of the WSC Literature Committee. While the exact details are not yet clear, the Office Manager signed a contract under pressure with the author who was to do the work just two weeks prior to the WSC where the hiring of a writer was the subject of a published motion.

The Fellowship was dismayed yet gave their support for the effort. Thoughtful members were stunned. A lot of members who had been the source of solid support left the Fellowship or survived in a damaged form. When service is a matter of the heart, betrayal of principles for business purposes creates heartbreak. When the resulting approval form came out, numerous errors of voice, feeling, and content resulted in a ‘no’ vote at the next Conference. The conflict that was set in motion consisted of the Office, on one hand, trying to get out more ‘product.’ On the other hand, the Fellowship was trying to maintain the traditional group conscience processes. These processes are what had built the Fellowship up to the point of writing material to serve the needs of the worldwide Fellowship. The attraction of the message that was contained in the original Basic Text continued to draw in addicts from the world of active addiction. This wasn't enough and there were those who sought to control the copyrights on the material and made changes outside of the Fellowship's view. It is important that these incidents were perpetuated by as few as ten or fifteen people. Our disease is characterized by tunnel vision where something small can seem tragically important and widespread. Of the ten or fifteen, most were duped into the conspiracy by the ring leaders. The Fellowship continued to grow despite all these things.

A housekeeping motion from the 1985 WSC to correct errors of grammar, spelling, tense, gender agreement, etc. was misconstrued to mean that hundreds of changes in the Basic Text were permissible if not absolutely necessary. The word ‘syntax’ was removed from the original motion lest it be expanded to mean ‘grammar.’ There was concern that the motion would get out of hand and result in abusive or unnecessary changes. A few sentences had already been changed from the original Approval Form of Narcotics Anonymous. The Approval form was universally available within NA and a free copy was sent to every registered group in the world, including overseas. The strength of the material to withstand the intense discussion and scrutiny of thousands of members, each of whom was free to input recommended changes is what Approval used to mean. Changes by a few members betrayed the faith of thousands of members who had surrendered in trust to the process. This is why the unauthorized changes made by a few people in positions of trust were such a big deal.

The minor changes that were made from year to year were used to justify calling different printings of the Basic Text ‘editions.’ Usually, editions reflect substantial changes or major edits and require a new edition number to keep old material from being confused with heavily reworked, new material. The change of a sentence or two out of hundreds of thousands of words does not comprise a new ‘edition’ and yet we have had many. At one point, the Basic Text was edited to make the work consistent with quoted changes in the Little White Book. This revised form of the Third Edition was called the Third Edition, Revised. When an editor was found to make the superficial edit of the Basic Text in keeping with the 1985 motion, the editor was given a manuscript of the Third Edition. This had built-in problems from the start. There were several glaring oversights like this at the time. Either no one knows or will divulge who changed the instructions that were given to the editor. The instructions that were given the editor were to make a deep edit of the Basic Text. While trust is important, simple checks and balances would have prevented the initial small problems from escalating into major concerns.

No one thought to compare the work of the editor with the Third Edition, Revised. Therefore, the differences were handled as if they were the correct form of the work. Further, the changes were discussed and voted on by the Committee in a series of exhaustive and expensive conference calls with up to fifteen members in on the call from all over the United States but only one able to speak at a time. The changes were brought up, line by line, discussed and voted on prior to moving on to the next change. Participants were not given finals of the edited changes prior to the printing and distribution of the new form of the Basic Text, now in its Fourth Edition. Where changes had involved twenty or thirty words, there were now changes in hundreds of sentences involving thousands of words.

The Board of Trustees was not given a copy of the work prior to printing despite repeated assurances to the WSO Board that this would be done. The entire Fellowship went into convulsions when the treasured phrases and meaningful lines were found to be most often just altered. Not improved, not better grammar, just changed or deleted to suit a small group of people who were in on the changes. Even the members of the Committee were not in a position to appreciate the magnitude of the breach of faith that was committed by the World Service Office management and certain members of the WSC Literature Committee. This embarrassing situation resulted in either the immediate or the eventual dismissal of the culprits. Curiously, the facts never really came out into the full view of the Fellowship.

Another sore spot that concerned many members who had participated in the writing of the Basic Text was that there was an original understanding that the price of the book would go down after a decent interval. This was agreed upon in order to help the WSO expand into its new service demands. Although this had come up year after year at the WSC, everybody was convinced that to lower the price would break the Fellowship by the time the vote was taken. This picture was a far different from the reality of the Spirit-based Fellowship, potent enough to write the book that attracted the millions. This book was written anonymously and within all the peculiar boundaries that we set for ourselves in order to maintain our humility and recovery. More and more the general Fellowship was unable to understand the origins of the book, to appreciate the trust bonds that were made, to conjure up the tremendous effort, and to comprehend the personal sacrifice that it took to generate the Basic Text.

One way to try and get a glimpse of this energy in the simplest terms is by using simple mathematics. Some of the early Literature Conferences were attended by less than seventy-five or a hundred members. Some later Conferences had more members in attendance. In addition, many members worked a considerable number of weekends in local literature committees getting material ready for the next Literature Conference. The members who attended the Literature Conferences usually came from these local committees and carried their group’s conscience with them. They were asked to consider what members in meetings in their home area thought. This was expressed separately from their personal feelings and responses. In this way, the spirit of discussions in many local communities was brought into the deliberations on the writing of our Basic Text. A hundred members who were at a Conference might have come from seventy different communities, each with maybe fifteen to thirty members involved.

There were seven ‘official’ WSC Literature Conferences held from 1979 to 1982. Each Conference encouraged participants who came from all over the Fellowship to take home photocopies of the new writing as evidence to support the tales that the participants had to tell. Early experience taught us that the participants would have trouble conveying all the information they picked up in a week of these incredible working Conferences. Multiply a hundred people by twenty hours a day for a week and see what you get. They say it took 100,000 hours to build the first atomic bomb. With 2,000 addict hours a day, a week long conference might involve 14,000 on site. There were numbers of members working at home in local literature committees to top off the hours spent writing the text just during a conference week. Several large communities work from Friday to Sunday several weekends in a row with thirty to fifty addicts attending. The miracle is that not only did the book get written, no one got loaded at a Conference. The pressure was intense, but it was good pressure. The love and compassion at the conferences were emblematic of the new Fellowship that was finally writing it's Basic Text, after so many years. These open, participatory conferences were styled to include all members. No clean addict was ever turned away or kept from participating. Those who were new to recovery were valued for their fresh viewpoint just as those who had long periods of clean time were valued for theirs. A tremendous bonding took place among members working on the book from all over the world. This openness and freedom can be felt when you read the original, unedited works.

When the Forth Edition came out, it had thousands of unauthorized changes. Members, who were gathered at Jackson Mill, West Virginia for the True Colors Convention, sat and compared the Forth Edition with the Third Edition, Revised. Members took turns reading aloud from the Fourth Edition while ten members followed the reading with Third Edition, Revised in their hands. The first few variations weren't too alarming. Once the reading got into the chapters of the Book, it was obvious to anyone present that great liberties had been taken and there would be major problems. A call was made to the World Service Office and certain members in the service structure expressed their surprise at the notion that there were problems . . . A hideous era proceeded to unfold during which several competing versions, about what had happened and what the repercussions would be, began to multiply endlessly throughout the Fellowship. It was self-evident that the changes had been made and obvious that they exceeded the scope of a motion that had been amended to revive the word syntax in order to prevent excessive editing while correcting spelling and making other minor changes. Who had done what? . . . and why?, preoccupied the Fellowship. While the World Service Office justified its actions, the Fellowship was torn apart.

At the 1988 WSC, the voting participants approved a plan to restore a few deleted sentences and call it the Fifth Edition! This happened despite the fact that many Regional Representatives came to the WSC with specific instructions from their home regions to vote down the Forth Edition and restore the Third Edition, Revised. It would be tedious to reiterate here, all of the maneuvers that occurred at the Conference. What happened seemed to justify some of the fears of certain members: that 'World Services' was getting out of hand and acting on its own outside of the Fellowships' knowledge or approval. This type of irresponsible action is known as following a separate agenda. The difficulty that we experienced with this situation is that although the spiritual Fellowship can tell something is going on, we may not be able to correct the wrong. We have to go to extraordinary lengths in our efforts to deal effectively with this sort of wrongdoing.

One member from West Virginia (who had informed himself as to the many WSC minutes, reports, and guidelines) decided to take on the system. This member was known affectionately as ‘Grateful Dave.’ Where others had backed off, he made a point of infuriating the members in World Service until they could see no way out but to sue good old Dave in Federal Court. After all, he had caused thousands of copies of the Third Edition, Revised to be printed, sold, or given away all over the Fellowship. This infamous Baby Blue version of the Basic Text was actually given out at some meetings to newcomers instead of the usual white poker chips or key tags because of its low cost. It was Dave's metaphor to get across the point that the Fourth and Fifth Editions had never enjoyed the benefit of having been approved by the voting members of the NA Fellowship at the group level like all other literature up to that point in time. His often stated concern was that we have to be very careful in our written message. He believed that our literature should be within the reach of as many addicts seeking recovery as possible. Financial concerns should not outweigh the needs of those who will die of addiction because they happen to miss out on our message.

Efforts to avoid a lawsuit in the Fall of 1990 were unsuccessful. Tempers flared in World Services and the intensity of the personal attack and venom was unparalleled in our history. How dare a member challenge the ‘machinery of World Services’ over the price of literature as well as questioning the correctness of printing the Fifth Edition which was never subjected to Fellowship-wide review or approval. Surely, he was profiteering and making money by printing and selling the Baby Blue. It became generally known that Dave was financially broke and was dying of another disease. Still, it was Dave's tactic to get the forces that had worked behind the scenes making the unauthorized changes out into the open and it worked. The viewpoint that key members ran World Services was challenged in a memorable way.

On January 3, 1991, Dave was called to Federal court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The judge was responsible for putting away the French Connection’s New York dope man. Without repeating all the details, suffice it to say that the Honorable Judge Pollack could have easily ordered ‘Grateful Dave’ to stop printing and distributing the Baby Blue and that would have been the end of it. The Judge was so moved by the phenomenal effort of thousands of recovering addicts that he carried the case forward and admonished the WSO to fulfill their side of the agreement as well as Dave. Dave's case relied on the position that the Fellowship wrote the literature and therefore had printing rights. It also alleged that the WSO had no right to print literature that was not voted on by the ‘general membership’, hence the Fourth and Fifth Editions were illegal printings. The WSO took the opposing position that he was intruding on the copyrights. The WSO claimed that the work was ‘done for hire’ and justified this position by pointing to the money that the WSO had paid to the editor who had worked on the Fourth Edition.

Judge Pollack stated in his address at the end of the first day of trial that he dealt with people who were afflicted with our disease on a daily basis in his court room. He stated that we had stumbled on to something special but had evidently forgotten our primary purpose along the way. This opinion was definitely an unexpected and strange turn of events that forced certain members, who were in favor of pursuing the lawsuit, to rethink their positions. Some members were embarrassed when they began to find out more particulars. Grateful Dave died in the Fall of 1992 with the fervent hope that the case would make certain members admit and acknowledge how their actions affect others. He hoped that this would result in affordable, ‘group-conscience’ based literature for the Fellowship. Many members stand ready to challenge any and all efforts to make unauthorized attempts to do away with our traditional approaches to ‘service’ in NA.

It may sound like a lot of work and in many ways it is. This dedication and commitment is what it takes for us to have our own Fellowship. It is hardcopy evidence of our love, gratitude and devotion backed up by hard work, clear thinking and dedication. It is also enormously fun and has a lot of real life excitement rather than the alternatives. We get to spend our time with people who enjoy our company and frequently appear to be amused by our worst problems. They have been there and they have simple answers and suggestions that might work for us. It is scary to have answers after all the years of hopelessness. These clean addicts are growing in number constantly and are available in countries all over the world. We will continue to learn and to share the NA Way and carry our message to every corner of the globe. We, recovering addicts in NA today, are grateful to all of those who made the Program and our recovery possible. Many people loved us and wished us well even when we were difficult and undeserving. Living our life clean gives us some general idea of how hard it is to love us. The lessons that we learn by helping others teaches us that we have to give a little but we get a lot. Grateful NA members who contribute of their time, and with their lives, can say, "It is only quantity that we give and fortunately, we get quality in return."