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From: Kermit O
Category: Category 1
Date: 27 Nov 2002
Time: 01:44:51
Remote Name: cache-mtc-ak09.proxy.aol.com
The Saturday Evening Post - August 7,1954 (page 22) - These Drug Addicts Cure One Another - By Jerome Ellison A new approach to a tragic social problem - drug addiction - has been found by the ex-addicts of Narcotics Anonymous�.. �..They met twice weekly to make this freedom secure, and worked to help other addicts achieve it. The New York group, founded in 1950 and called Narcotics Anonymous, is one of several which have been piling up evidence that the methods of Alcoholics Anonymous can help release people from other drugs than alcohol--drugs such as opium, heroin, morphine and the barbiturates.. The drug addict, like the alcoholic, has long been an enigma to those who want to help him. Real contact is most likely to be made, on a principle demonstrated with phenomenal success by Alcoholics Anonymous, by another addict...The N.A. member first shares his shame with the newcomer. Then he shares his hope and finally, sometimes, his recovery.. To date, the A.A. type of group therapy has been an effective ingredient of "cures' � the word as used here means no drugs for a year or more and an intent of permanent abstinence�in at least 200 cases. Some of these, including Dan, the founder of the New York group, had been pronounced medically hopeless. The "Narco" Group in the United States Public Health Service Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky has a transient membership of about eighty men and women patients. The group mails a monthly newsletter, THE KEY, free to those who want it, currently a list of 500 names. Many of these are interested but non-addicted friends. Most are "mail-order members" of the group--addicts who have left the hospital and been without drugs for periods ranging from a few weeks to several years. The H.F.D. (Habit-Forming Drug) Group is a loosely affiliated fellowship of California ex-addicts who keep "clean" --the addicts' term for a state of abstinence--by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with volunteer AA. sponsors. The Federal prison at Lorton, Virginia, has a prisoner group which attracts thirty men to its weekly meetings. Narcotics Anonymous in New York is the sole "free world" (outside of institutions) group which conducts its own weekly open-to-the-public meetings in the AA. tradition�.. Narcotics Anonymous -- A.A.'s Young Brother The American interested himself in Frank Buchman's Oxford Group, found sobriety, and told an inebriate friend of his experience. The friend sobered up and took the message to a former drinking partner, a New York stockbroker named Bill. Though he was an agnostic who had never had much use for religion, Bill sobered up. Late in 1935, while on a business trip to Akron, Ohio, he was struck by the thought that he wouldn't be able to keep his sobriety unless he passed on the message. He sought out a heavy-drinking local surgeon named Bob and told him the story to date. They sat down and formulated a program for staying sober -- a program featuring twelve Suggested Steps and called Alcoholics Anonymous. Bill devoted full time to carrying the A.A. message, and the news spread. The now famous article by Jack Alexander in The Saturday Evening Post of March 1,1941, made it nationally known, and by 1944 there were A.A. groups in the major cities. In June of that year an inebriate mining engineer whom we'll call Houston `hit bottom' with his drinking in Montgomery, Alabama, and the local A.A.'s dried him up. Houston gobbled the A.A. program and began helping other alcoholics. One of the drunks he worked with--a sales executive who can be called Harry--was involved not only with alcohol but also morphine. AA took care of the alcoholic factor, but left Harry's drug habit unchanged. Interested and baffled, Houston watched his new friend struggle in his strange self-constructed trap. The opiate theme of the narrative now reappears. Harry's pattern had been to a roaring drunk, take morphine to avoid a hangover, get drunk again and take morphine again. Thus he became "hooked"--addicted. He drove through a red light one day and was stopped by a policeman. The officer found morphine and turned him over to the Federal jurisdiction, with the result that Harry spent twenty-seven months at Lexington, where both voluntary and involuntary patients are accommodated, as a prisoner. After his discharge he met Houston, and, through A.A. found relief from the booze issue. The drug problem continued to plague him. During this period, Houston, through one of those coincidences which A.A.'s like to attribute to a Higher Power, was transferred by his employers to Frankfort, Kentucky, just a few miles from Lexington. "Harry's troubles kept jumping through my brain," Houston says. "I was convinced that the twelve Suggested Steps would work as well for drugs as for alcohol if conscientiously applied. One day I called on Dr. V.H. Vogel, the medical officer then in charge at Lexington. I told him of our work with Harry and offered to assist in starting a group in the hospital. Doctor Vogel accepted the offer and on Feb. 16,1947, the first meeting was held. Weekly meetings have been going on ever since." The Phenomenon of "Physical Dependence" Some months later, in a strangely woven web of coincidence, Harry reappeared at "Narco" as a voluntary patient and began attending meetings. He was discharged, relapsed, and in a short time was back again. "This time," he says, "it clicked." He has now been free from both alcohol and drugs for more than five years. Twice he has returned to tell his story at meetings, in the A.A. tradition of passing on the good word. In the fall of 1948 there arrived at Lexington an addict named Dan who had been there before. It was, in fact, his seventh trip; the doctors assumed that he'd continue his periodic visits until he died. This same Dan Inter founded the small but significant Narcotics Anonymous group in New York. Dan's personal history is the story of an apparently incurable addict apparently cured.... This is the interval of greatest vulnerability, N.A. members say, to the addicts inevitable good resolutions. He has formed the habit of using his drug when he feels low. If he breaks off medical supervision before he is physically and mentally back to par, the temptation to relapse may be overwhelming. It is during this period, Dan says, that the addict most needs the kind of understanding he finds in N.A.... ��As a result he (Dan) was among the first prisoner patients at the new United States Public Health Service Hospital for addicts at Lexington, when it was first opened on May 28,1935... ��On his (Dan) seventh trip to Lexington, in 1948, he was in a profound depression. After a month of sullen silence, he began attending group meetings, which were a new feature at the hospital since his last trip. "I still wouldn't talk" he reports, "but I did some listening. I was impressed by what Houston had to say. Harry came back one time and told us His story. For the first time, I began to pray. I was only praying that I would die, but at least it was a prayer." He did not die, nor did he recover. Within six months of his discharge he was found in possession of drugs and sent back to Lexington for a year � his eighth and, as it turned out, final trip. "This time things were different, " he says. "Everything Houston and Harry had been saying suddenly made sense. There was a lawyer from a southern city there at the time, and a midwest surgeon. They were in the same mood I was � disgusted with themselves and really ready to change. The three of us used to have long talks with Houston every Saturday morning, besides the regular meetings." All three recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of their emancipation from the drug habit. Dan, conscious of what seemed to him a miraculous change of attitude, returned to New York full of enthusiasm and hope. The twelfth of the Suggested Steps was to pass on the message to others who needed help. He proposed to form the first outside-of-institution group and call it Narcotics Anonymous � N.A. He contacted other Lexington Alumni and suggested they start weekly meetings. There were certain difficulties. Addicts are not outstandingly gregarious, and when all the excuses were in only three � a house painter named Charlie, a barber named Henry and a waiter we�ll call George � were on hand for the first meeting. There was uncertainty about where this would be; nobody, it seemed wanted addicts around. Besides, missionary, or "twelfth step," work of the new group would be hampered by the law�.. �..Drug peddlers were not enthusiastic about the new venture. Rumors circulated discrediting the group. Out of the gloom, however, came unexpected rays of friendliness and help. The Salvation Army made room for meetings at its 46th Street cafeteria. Later the McBurney Y.M.C.A., on 23rd Street, offered a meeting room. Two doctors backed their oral support by sending patients to meetings. Two other doctors agreed to serve on an advisory board. There were slips and backslidings. Meetings were sometimes marred by obstinacy and temper. But three of the original four remained faithful and the group slowly grew�.. Group statistics estimate that 5000 inquiries have been answered, constituting a heavy drain on the groups treasury. Some 600 addicts have attended one or more meetings, 90 have attained effective living without drugs�.. �..One relapse after the first exposure to N.A. principles seems about par, though a number have not found this necessary. "A key fact of which few addicts are aware," Dan says, "is that once he�s been addicted, a person can never again take even one dose of any habit-forming drug, including alcohol and the barbiturates, without running into trouble. The weekly "open" � to the public � meetings are attended by ten to thirty persons � addicts, their friends and families and concerned outsiders. The room is small and on Friday evenings when more than twenty-five turn up, crowed. There is an interval of chitchat and visiting, and then, about nine o�clock, the secretary�.. opens the meeting. In this ceremony, all repeat a well-known prayer: �.. The secretary then introduces a leader � a member who presents the speakers and renders interlocutor�s and evening � describe their adventures with drugs and with N.A�. �..Harold and Carl have now been four years without drugs; Manny, three; Marian, Don, and Pat, one�.. Besides the Friday open meeting there is a Tuesday closed meeting at the Y for addicts only. As a special dispensation I was permitted to attend a closed meeting, the purpose of which is to discuss the daily application of the twelve steps�.. The Narco meetings at Lexington have born other fruit. There was Charlie, the young GI from Washington, D.C., who...discovered that there was a concentration of addicts in the Federal penitentiary at Lorton, Virginia. Working with Alcoholics Anonymous, which already had meetings going in the prison, he obtained permission to start a group like the one at Lexington. Now a year old, these meetings, called the Notrol Group -- Lorton backwards --attract the regular attendance of about thirty addicts�.. Friendliness of ex-drug addicts with former devotees of alcohol sometimes occurs, though Bill, the same who figured so prominently in A.A.'s founding says a fraternal attitude cannot be depended upon. The average A.A., he says, would merely look blank if asked about drug addiction, and rightly reply that this specialty is outside his understanding. There are, however, a few A.A.'s who have been addicted to both alcohol and to drugs, and these sometimes function as "bridge members." "If the addict substitutes the word "drugs" whenever he hears `Alcohol' in the AA. program, he'll be helped," Houston says. Many ex-addicts, in the larger population centers where meetings run into the hundreds, attend A.A. meetings. The H.F.D. (Habit-Forming-Drug) Group, which is activated by an energetic ex-addict and ex-alcoholic of the Los Angeles area named Betty, has dozens of members, but no meetings of its own�.. The roll call of ex-addict groups is small. There is the parent Narco Group, Addicts Anonymous, P.O. Box 2000, Lexington, Ky.; Narcotics Anonymous, P.O. Box 3, Village Station, New York 14, N.Y.; Notrol Group CIO U.S. Penitentiary, Lorton, Va.; H.F.D. Group, c/o Secretary, Bay Area Rehabilitation Center, 1458 26th St., Santa Monica, Calif�... New York Herald Tribune - August 21, 1956 (article page l2) - Danny Carlsen. Founder Of Narcotics Anonymous Danny Carlsen, fifty,..... died Sunday (8/19)......He was founder of Narcotic Anonymous. .�.(He) finally "kicked" the habit in 1949 after he returned to New York City following his eighth stay at the Public Health Service Hospital for addicts in Lexington, Ky. This time, he brought back with him the idea for Narcotics Anonymous, based on the day-to-day principles of Alcoholics Anonymous�.. The Salvation Army welcomed Mr. Carlsen and his project and gave him a small office in which he held twice-a-week meetings with other addicts anxious to rehabilitate themselves. The idea, like its prototype Alcoholics Anonymous, spread, and within a year there were similar organizations in Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere�.. Mr. Carlsen had suffered the loss of one kidney as a result of the use of drugs, and had been in poor health a long time before his final illness. New York Times - August 21, 1956 (article pageL+ 29?) - Daniel L. Carlsen Dies Former Drug Addict Founded Narcotics Anonymous in `50 Daniel L Carlsen, founder of Narcotics Anonymous, died Sunday at Montefiore Hospital, the Bronx, after a long illness. He was 50 years old�.. Mr. Carisen was also executive director of the National Advisory Council on Narcotics, an educational group. As this any many other articles since have stated, a man who they called Huston from Montgomery, Alabama had the first kernel of an idea that addicts could get and stay clean using the 12 step philosophies of AA. That man has surfaced, in South Boston, Viriginia. He realy was named Huston and his last name realy was Sewell. My sponsee who has been clean for over 18 years has been having conversations with Hustons niece, who is now an elderly woman. She clealy states how her uncle was the founder of Naroctics Anonymous. We have been trying to make further contact to see if she has any documentation. Her story is similar in that her uncle moved from Montgomery to Lexington, KY to work. He was originaly from South Boston, Virginia. He met with Doctor Vogel, who was the director of the Federal Detox Center in Lexington, the only place at the time for addicts to dry out. This is the same facility, as mentioned above, that Danny Carlson came back to 9 times (the number varies per article that you read), and finnaly surrendered. He went back to NY to found something called Narcotics Anonymous. This was the first use of the word, the NY fellowship that is. Lexington saw themselves as addicts anonymous. Our history has direct links to Lexington and NY for several reasons. Lexington's methodology was latter used in Houston, TX federal detox, were many California felons were going to try to get clean. Lexington also produced a newsletter called "The Key". In the minutes of the first Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Califorinia, and the one all groups can trace their routes back to, it clealy states: "We take our purpose from The Key" Meaning the Lexington Narcotics Anonymous/Addicts Anonymous newsletter of the same name. The NY Connection is clarified when we find out that Major Dorothy Barry of the Salvation Army who gave meeting space and much incouragment to the NY NA fellowship, latter moved to California and there to offered much assistance to the young strugling fellowship, as Bob B. recalled. The two biggest problems that the NY fellowship encountered, both tradition violations (sadly the traditions were not to be written by AA for many years to come) was that they had a board of trustees but no addicts were allowed on it. Father Dan Eagen and Major Barry were apparantly two of the principles on the Board, and secondly, that they tried to do alot more than just help addicts stay clean. They tried to get housing, clothing, jobs etc. So much so that Danny Carlson's helper/sponsee you would say, Rae Lopez, ended up with an office in the Federal Narcotics Devision headquarters. One half of the office was NA, the other half was Narcotics Devision. Danny passed away and NA slowly fell apart. However, the dream always lived on, that addicts could get and stay clean using the 12 steps.