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Source: DICOBE-00539 – Russell S – DR BOB'S NEPHEW – 1980-06-15.mp3 File: dicobe-00539-russell-s-dr-bobs-nephew-1980-06-15.mp3 Duration: 00:51:21
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The next speaker is representing Alateen, Debbie S. from Akron. From Al-Anon, from Hudson, Maryland H. And this is truly a pleasure. Next is our beautiful wife of our co-founder, Bill Wilson-Lewis. And this next guy, Barry L., he writes much of our literature. He's Lewis's traveling commandant, and he's just one swell guy in my book. When I first met him, I didn't like him, but I sure like him now. You know, they say when you're wrong, promptly admit it. Next is our Akron Intergroup Vice Chairman, Carolyn V., who will read from the original draft of the fifth chapter. Carol, would you come up? My name is Carol Varnum, and I'm an alcoholic.
Back up to that east-west hilltop where the fellowship dinner was for our dance. It's all free. Now, what we came here for. Our speaker tonight, boy, I'm telling you, this guy, he got here in Akron in time for the fellowship dinner. And I was thinking, I'm glad he's a doctor. He's going to have to prescribe, because I was getting nervous. I didn't know, I tell you. But he's a busy man, I found out. He's been doing an awful lot of traveling, and I can understand why. Dr.
Russell S. from Whitmore Lake, Michigan. Hi, everybody. I'm Russ S., a gratefully recovering alcoholic, through the grace of God, an AA. You know, as I was listening to those singers and seeing all this sobriety stand up in this room, I wonder what a fellow like me was doing in a place like this. I only went on two benders in my life. Of course, the first one was from 44 to 47, and the second one was from 47 to 56. You know, I was a simple high school type drinker, drunk every weekend from the time I was 17 on. I had my first blackout when I graduated from high school in 1940. I woke up two days later on the Coast Guard Gunnery Range over at Grand Haven with a couple of seamen kicking me so they could start shooting their guns. I came on to the University of Michigan and made my first major mistake. I studied anthropology. And when I graduated from Michigan in 44, right on top of my diploma, it said, Greetings. Your friends and neighbors have chosen you to represent them in the current conflict. And immediately, I went off to you know where. Well, when the war was over, they discovered that I was an anthropologist, so they gave me the job of digging up and identifying all the World War II dead west of Midway Island. Well, there were four of us in that outfit. Three of us became alcoholics. See, the Navy said they'd teach us a civilian trade. They kept their word. They made three alcoholics out of four. The fourth was a Baptist minister, so he simply went crazy. So I'm not so sure that I didn't get the best of the deal. But you know, as I came back to the University of Michigan, I had a dad who was a doctor. I really didn't want to go into medicine. I saw the kind of life he led. And besides that, I was getting sick and tired of being his little boy. So I really hadn't any intention of going into medicine. But when I came back to Ann Arbor, it looked like better than what I was doing. I'd rather deal with live people than dead people. So I went into medical school and things went all right. You know, I hear stories about people who have really lost big things. Wives, fortunes, jobs. I only lost
[00:05:00]
little things like the Pacific Ocean, two years of medical school, and so forth. So I really have a quite an uncolorful kind of story. But you know, by the time I got to my junior year in medical school, the dean began receiving word that the patients would prefer to have their anesthesia downstairs in the anesthesia area instead of at the bedside from my breath. So he called me in and made me aware of a thing called moral turpitude, and that meant either shape up or ship out. So I was one of the very earliest beneficiaries of this whole principle of tough love or benevolent coercion. Well, I was then sent to the chairman of the psychiatric department, and Dr. Wagner sat me down in a chair. He said, Russ, so far as I know, I have never had any success with alcoholics.
And the only thing I can offer you is that there's some kind of subversive group meeting in the basement of the Ann Arbor YMCA, and I advise you to go down there and see what you can find out, and if you learn anything good, come up and tell me about it. Well, I went to my first Wednesday night down at the Y, and I sort of hung back by the door. And all of a sudden, one of the old fellas, and I think the average age of that table was 65 and older, turned around and he caught a look at me, and he said, now, kid, we don't want the room swept up yet. Would you kindly go away and come back in an hour or two, and then you can sweep the place up? Well, I was looking, as a lot of you were, for any good reason not to go to AA, and that sounded like just a peachy keen one to me, so I went away and didn't come back for several weeks. Well, in my difficulties in trying to get my act together, and I think basically you're beginning to see now that I was a slow learner, but we really didn't have all of the resources that we have today. My dad remembered that he had a distant relative kicking around in Akron, Ohio, and there wasn't anything else better to do. So he drove down here, and I sat down on one occasion in 47, and another occasion in 48 with this fellow, once at a hospital and once over here at the bank building. And I can remember driving home to Ann Arbor and thinking, you know, that is the most self-righteous, supercilious, dogmatic guy I've ever met. He doesn't really know anything about people who have real drinking problems.
Well, that was Dr. Bob. You can see what kind of a bonehead I was. So then I continued on trying to struggle and put my sobriety together, and actually in later life, Bill actually took me off to the side, and he said, you know, Russ, I think you represented one of Bob's major failures, and that really bothered him most of his life. So at least there was some impact, and if Bob is where he can hear us, certainly the things he did say there eventually took fruit, but much later after his death. Well, as time went on, and I graduated from medical school, you know how you get down there and they play pomp and circumstance, and you walk down the stage, and you pick up this nice leatherette folder. I opened mine up, and there wasn't any diploma in it. So I went back to see the dean, and I said, Dean Furstenberg, didn't you forget something? He said, no, I haven't.
And he pulled out his upper desk drawer, and he says, see, there's your diploma right there. All you have to do is go down to Chicago. I have a friend there who will teach you a little something about alcoholism, and once you've finished three and a half years with him, you can have your diploma. So you're looking at one of the few doctors you're going to ever see who took eight years to get through four years of medical school. When I arrived at Chicago, got myself settled, the dean's friend happened to be in charge of the medical service at Cook County Hospital, and I was immediately put in charge of four 40-bed wards full of Korsakoff's disease, Wernicke's psychosis. You know, actually, the odds were against the person ever leaving by the front door, and most people left by the ward elevator. We never had to worry about where our patients were. We just stood still in the middle of the floor and listened to those livers sloshing back and forth in 40 pounds of water. You never had to guess who the visitors were on our wards because all of our patients had beautiful yellow eyeballs. I can still remember one fellow we called the Spider Man down there. His body was completely round. You could put your fingers around his upper arms and his upper legs, and actually, it was excruciating pain for him to even breathe.
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Now, after about a year and a half, he mercifully died, and we were doing a post-mortem. Here he was laying on the counter, and his body weighed 65 pounds. His liver filled up one of those old-fashioned round metal wash tubs, and his liver weighed 95 pounds. So I knew somebody who, at the time he died, whose liver was larger than he was. Well, you'd think that working up to my eyeballs in Terminal Alcoholics, seeing one patient after another die in the most horrible and frightening ways known to man, that that would keep you sober. Well, I thought so too.
You know, anybody who's working with alcoholics all day long doesn't need to go to those silly meetings. So I kept drinking and falling off and getting up and falling off and getting up and falling off, and it really wasn't until I got back to the Ann Arbor area and ran into a few people in that area that they finally convinced me that maybe one had to attend these silly meetings and keep it simple and put one foot ahead of the other and develop some humility and eventually sobriety after long lost keen. Well, I think to me the process of recovery has been a lot more interesting than the process of getting sick. As I say, my alcoholic history doesn't make much of a drunk-a-log. My drinking really doesn't create any major inspirational notes on my part, but I'd certainly like to sort of relive with you again the whole process of getting well.
Remember that first day after the last drink when somebody's pounding on an empty oil drum inside of your head and your eyeballs are jumping six inches out of the socket and your stomach is doing inside barrel loops and you don't know whether it's going to come up this end or out the other end, your blood pressure is pounding your eardrums out from the inside, you haven't had any sleep for two days, and the only thing you're pretty sure of is the person that's sick couldn't possibly live until noon. Now, can you imagine when you know that one drink is going to stop all of that, how hard it is not to take that drink? You know, you hang on, your knuckles get white. You really think that maybe next time you'll do a better job, but you hang in there and after two or three days the pain starts to go away, you get a night's sleep, your appetite starts coming back. In fact, in some cases it comes back too well and stays there. But frankly, you start to feel like a human being. But for those of you who've been through it, what goes up has to come down. Remember those down days that follow the withdrawal, when you really think that there isn't any hope whatsoever for a person like you, when you're not really sure the sun is going to come up tomorrow, when you really feel that you're so low you need a stepladder just to get up even with the earth. You know, even the thought at that time crosses your mind, you know, you're at the bottom of a glass well, somebody's about to lower the lid on, and maybe you're never going to see the light of day again. And I'm sure you, like me, have thought that, you know, if this is all there is, if this is what there is to sobriety, maybe I ought to go out and end it all. Certainly I thought that several times, especially as I tried to stay sober, tried to make it through the withdrawal period, and it didn't happen. Finally it did. It did with the help of some fairly interested sponsors who sat up and held my hand, who held the wastebasket so I wouldn't mess up all over the floor, who lived through that nightmare with me and held my hand until finally I was through both the ups and the downs. You know, you'd expect that after you'd went through that, anything would be uphill. But you know, as we recall this together, it really isn't. Because, you know, the next hurdle's even bigger. Now you've got to go back to all those people you care about, all those people that you love and they love you, all those people who know you so well they know where your goat's tied, and you've got to re-establish a new relationship. Because, see, when we're drinking, alcoholism is a very generous disease. When we alcoholics drink, everybody drinks.
And when we alcoholics feel guilty, everybody feels Alcoholics feel guilty, everybody feels guilty.
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So frankly, we've got to begin all over again, and that's a pretty hard kind of job. You know, as I sit around in meetings and over at the hospitals that I work at, I hear a lot of people wondering about how their alcoholism is going to affect the state of Ohio, or the United States of America, or the Ford Motor Car Company, or General Electric. And you know, we know how that's going to work out. The most commonly encountered attitude that we alcoholics encounter, so far as our drinking is concerned, is complete, total, 100 percent apathy, unless we try to spread it around.
Then the natives get hostile, and they really don't want us to give it to them. So really, we have to reestablish relationships with those people that we care about. Well, that's a pretty big order. Because, you know, as I've gone through my life, I've really seen that during this period of time, what we need is a lot of forgiveness and trust and understanding. In fact, I was saying to myself, the first five or ten years that I stayed sober, you know, how come my wife doesn't understand that I'm trying to stay sober?
How come they won't get off my back, and they look a little worried if I slip on a throw rug in the living room, or they look a little gray if I've been held up in traffic for a half an hour? But, you know, as time went on, I realized that I've been held up in traffic for three or four days on occasion. And, you know, that there might be some reason for this whole thing not to be based entirely and totally on trust.
Well, you know, the more I thought about it, the more I thought maybe I was going about the whole business the wrong way. Maybe I would have to provide the forgiveness, the trust, and the understanding. Because, you know, once I understood that it was me who was going to the meetings, it was me who knew what my intentions were, it was me who knew that I was going to stay sober, that made the other two a whole lot easier.
Because it was a lot easier to forgive somebody if they inhaled deeply, if I tripped on the throw rug. It was a lot easier to forgive somebody if they looked a little gray if I got held up a half an hour on a house call, if I knew that the reason they looked so worried is because they cared about me. It became a whole lot easier to forgive people when I knew that it was because they loved me. You know, the trust part came the easiest.
If you saw the world of the alcoholic the way I do in day-to-day treatment, you know that the one single thing that destroys human relationships more than any other single thing in our society is this thing we're talking about tonight, alcoholism. It separates more kids from parents, it separates more wives from husbands, it separates more husbands from wives, it separates more good friends than any other single thing in our society.
So, you know, once I realized that anybody who was still talking to me, anybody who still said they loved me, anybody who still said they cared, I couldn't do anything worse than I'd already done to them, so that our relationship had no place to go but right uphill. And, you know, once I realized that, it did. You know, I've seen and heard just about everything under the sun. I've seen one fellow who said, You know, Doc, I lived the first year and a half of sobriety.
It was probably the most humiliating time I'd ever seen. I'd get up out of my bed, I'd walk across my bedroom, pick up my wallet, and there'd be a buck and a half in it, just enough to buy lunch. Month in, month out, year in, year out. Finally, I got out of bed one day, walked across and picked up my wallet, and you know what was in there? A $20 bill. Well, you know, you get to borrow a little bit from almost everybody when you're in a dollar and a quarter allowance.
So he said, I went down to the plant, and I said, Fellas, lunch is on me. And we trooped out, and we had soup and sandwich, and I reached in my back pocket, and I flipped open my wallet, and do you know what was in there? A dollar and a quarter. It made me so humiliated, I couldn't wait to get to the nearest bar. So that's that forgiveness, that trust, and that understanding. So, you know, for those of you who are under 10 years, go out there prepared to provide enough forgiveness, trust, and understanding, and you'll get through that very difficult period,
[00:20:01]
which is almost as difficult as those spacemen coming in from the moon and readjusting to the earth, and that's why I affectionately call it the reentry period. Now, I think for myself, since I basically am a celebration drinker, the next six months were even worse. You know, that's when things are going well. That's when those two guys with the big dog who are waiting to pounce on your TV set in the automobile disappear.
That's when the income tax people stop auditing your returns. That's when your wife speaks to you when you get up in the morning. That's when your boss stops checking you down at the time clock. You know, everything's coming up like roses. And, you know, I think we all make the same mistakes. For myself, I sat down with things going very well and said, you know, somebody who's got everything in order, somebody who really hasn't got a debt, hasn't got a problem, whose family is feeling well about him, couldn't possibly be one of them there alcoholics.
Well, if you're not one of them there alcoholics, you don't have to go to those silly meetings, and there we are, off to the races again. And that's why I started getting sober in 44 and didn't finally get sober to 56. I'm a slow learner, and I have to do a lot of things by myself. Well, you know, there are other people that I've run into who simply say, gee, everything's going great, and I think I'd like to sit down and take a look over my shoulder and look back down the road I've struggled up and gloat about all the great things I've done, sort of pat themselves on their back.
And they turn around, and you know what they see? All the people they've hurt, all the things they've left undone, all the money they've squandered, and, you know, they get so doggone guilty they can't wait to get out to the nearest bar. So frankly, the pink cloud period certainly represented as much of a challenge to me as the early getting used and getting acquainted with your family. I think the last hurdle was probably the worst, and I think Father can testify to that, and that's this whole spiritual hurdle.
You know, as I've come along through the years, I've run into a lot of people who sit at the periphery of an AA meeting and say, by golly, I sure don't like all this spiritual stuff that's being bandied around here. It really makes me kind of nervous because I'm an agnostic, thank God. But, you know, that spiritual hurdle is a pretty big, difficult thing to get over because, you know, us alcoholics are guilty people, and I think I was probably the champion indoor guilty person of all time.
And, you know, we know an awful lot about human beings. For instance, when people are in trouble, we have a tremendous need for spiritual resources. Remember in God Is My Co-Pilot as the plane is crashing towards the ground and the engines have quit, how religious people can get at that particular point? I understand we have somebody here from Australia. It's amazing how religious and spiritual you can get when you're in a leaking rubber life raft as you see the dorsal fins of the great white shark slowly closing in for lunch.
In fact, as an anthropologist, I can tell you that you can put three chimpanzees in a cage and scare them bad enough they'll get together and organize a religion. So apparently, people who are in trouble have a tremendous need for spiritual resources. Well, the other alcoholics in this room will tell you that we alcoholics have a little bit of guilt. And guilty people don't feel too comfortable around things that are spiritual so that we're really alienated from the very thing that we need and want the most.
You know, for the first five years after I sobered up, I used to run from rock to rock so His Honor wouldn't get me with a lightning bolt while I was out in the open. And I used to so thoroughly believe that if I went into a house of worship, that the whole place would fall down and kill all of those innocent people. And you wouldn't believe the lives I saved for a period of five years. Well, my higher power and yours arranged things so that Austin Ripley would find me, drag me over to guest house.
And you know those guys over there pushed and dragged and conjoled and tugged. And it took them five years to get me over that hurdle and got me five years to get me up and back down on the other side.
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I don't think you could put a label or a denomination on what I have, but certainly it's a lot more comfortable than where I was. And I think actually, once you've gotten yourself physically well, once you've put your house in order and have your personal affairs in order, and once you've made your peace with your God, you've got the kind of sobriety that you won't turn in on another drink. Now, how do I view AA's helping me in all this?
Well, you know, one of the things that AA provided all the way along the line was a place that I could go and be a perfectly normal alcoholic amongst perfectly normal alcoholics. Can you believe that? Some place where you're not different. Some place where you're not the only alcoholic in the block. Some place where you can go and everybody knows why you feel the way you do. Everybody knows how and why you hurt.
But the one place that you can go and be perfectly comfortable, where you don't have to keep your act up, and you can be a perfectly normal alcoholic amongst other perfectly normal alcoholics. There was a time in my life when standing up in front of a group like this would have sent me right out through the wall, but I set it here at the dinner table. I think if this were a group of strangers, I'd still be sneaking towards the side door.
But this is a group of my friends. This is a group of people who understand me and a group of people that I understand, and we have that kind of brotherhood from one end of this country to the other and from one end of the globe to the other, and it's a treasure that we can't ignore. Okay, one of the other things that AA did for me in making this journey. You know, we need a way of preventing ourselves from taking another drink.
Do you realize that we human beings have to be taught to drink? Dumb, stupid animals don't drink alcoholic beverages. We have to breed a strain of rats who will drink alcoholic beverages normally. In the old days, Dr. Maslin used to mix up his cats and they drank the alcohol by mistake. When I used to do research, we used to starve the rats nearly to death and then put Metrocal in their booze and they'd drink the booze to get the Metrocal.
I'm going to give you this clue. We now do our research in fish, and we pour the booze in the water and a drunk fish is very easy to spot. They lose their writing reflex and turn over and swim around upside down. Now that's probably going to be one of the best things you've heard all night because if you're ever at a party and the goldfish are swimming around upside down, relax, it's the fish that are drunk and not you.
Well, actually, then you and I have to be taught to drink from very early in life. We experiment with it, then we drink socially like everybody else, then we maybe drink to solve a few problems here and there, to get up courage to ask a girl to dance and so forth, but eventually we're locked in and we start to drink to get well. You know, a lot of people don't understand that. They think alcoholics drink to get high.
Alcoholics drink to have some kind of experience. Most of the alcoholics I know, including me, drank to get to work on Monday morning, drank so nobody would know they drank the night before, drank so that they could function in a relatively normal way. So, you know, alcoholics eventually use alcohol for medicine. And finally, when you take over as captain of the Titanic, the medicine isn't working anymore, and we're frantically looking around for someplace else to land.
Well, you know, that's kind of difficult to deal with. Every alcoholic in this room spent 5, 10, 15, 20 years learning how to drink. And now you've got to spend the rest of your life unlearning how to drink. And AA gives us the best possible way of doing it. We walk into a room. We sit down with eight or nine other people and say, I'm across from John, Marion, George, and Joanne because I'm an alcoholic and I don't want to take another drink.
And in that way we keep reminding ourselves in a regular sort of fashion that I can't take another drink. That's a priceless gift, our sobriety. Now the next thing we have to do is develop a personal recovery and a personal growth system. See, we alcoholics are loners. We don't make a whole lot of friends. If you make a friend, you've got to either share your bottle with them or they're going to snitch on you.
So you really don't make a whole lot of friends, you know, as an alcoholic. And, you know, even if you could make that kind of friend, you can't carry them around in the back seat of your car. Kind of friend. You can't carry him around in the back seat of your car to tell you not to go into the tavern. You can't have him sleep under the bed to tell you, you know, not to take a drink.
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So frankly, you got to have a personal recovery system. You know, that's where the Twelve Steps come in. Now, I'm not going to bore you with a long tirade about the Twelve Steps. There's other people in this room who know a whole lot more about them than I do. But I'd like to tell you what Bill told me very quickly when to pay them back. But you know, I suddenly realized a very interesting thing. That in a year and a half or two, I can guarantee anybody who's sober here less than a year, that we aren't going to run out of new alcoholics. The supply seems to be indefinite.
And all we ask you to do when you're starting to feel grateful is to give them what was given to you, and in that way we have a wonderful banking system where no person who wants to get sober has to do without the help they need, and nobody who's been sober long enough to be grateful has to do without the ability to express that gratitude. You know, that's an inspired system. Mortals couldn't put together something that works as well as that does.
Well, you know, there's some thinking now, and I've certainly done some thinking back over the years, that say that AA does even more. You know, when a person first sobers up, I've already talked about it, husbands and wives aren't getting along too well, kids aren't getting along too well. You know, about five years ago, one of my other jobs was taking care of about 3,000 adjudicated juvenile delinquents.
And I was reading in a book called Federal Probation, the common causes of juvenile delinquency. And I found out it wasn't from being poor, it wasn't from living in a racial minority, it wasn't from living in a ghetto. Eighty percent of the kids locked up in this country in facilities for delinquents had one or both parents who were alcoholic. Well, I can see how that happened. My 14-year-old was in and out of treatment by the time he was 15.
But, you know, he's coming across the living room, and I roll over with the cigar stains and the beer stains on my T-shirt and say, Where are you going, kid? He says, In the bedroom to get some toys to take outside. Well, why are you going in there to get those toys? It's raining outside. Why don't you bring your little friends in here and see what a slob I got for an old man? Well, I wouldn't be such a slob if you treated me with respect and weren't such a rotten, ill-mannered kid.
And, you know, I can see what happens. After ten years of that, they finally deliver, and we get all of a sudden upset because we've told the kid he's been bad for ten years and he finally decides to start acting that way. So, you know, I can't leave this podium without saying how grateful I am for things like Al-Anon and Al-Ateem because it's a lot easier for us troubled alcoholics to get our act together when the people that are most important to us in getting that act together at least are willing to come halfway or even farther.
You know, alcoholics, I don't want to shock anybody, aren't basically too honest. I certainly wasn't. I've had people come in and say, Doc, all I've had is a couple of drinks. And they mean two gallons, two-fifths, two cases, you know. So, alcoholics aren't basically too honest. And, you know, just because we've sobered up doesn't mean that that's going to magically go away. Listen around the coffee urn some evening, and you're going to hear somebody just like me saying what kind of a job they're going to do at home, what kind of a job they're going to do at work.
And, you know, somebody's going to pipe up and say, Are you still doing things like that? Are you still conning people that way? And in this two-by-four kind of fashion, we finally get things where up is up and down is down and east is east and west is west. You know, on top of that, I think the most important thing is simply inherent in the kind of simple life we alcoholics lead. Do you realize that we have one solution for every problem while we're drinking?
The sun comes up in the morning, we get drunk. It goes down at night, we get drunk. It's Tuesday, we get drunk. We're having roast beef for dinner, we get drunk. We get hired, we get drunk. We get fired, we get drunk. And, you know, it's a terribly sobering thought that when we finally get sober, we have to come up with a separate solution to one of those problems. Now, that's called coping. And sooner or later, you're going to walk into a meeting muttering under your breath, and somebody's going to say, For crying out loud, what's the matter with you?
And you tell them your problem. And they say, Well, gee, I had a problem just like that when I came into AA. Now, that's not going to solve your problem, but it's going to tell you that an alcoholic just like you, who breathes air just like you do, has solved a problem just like you got.
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You know, that gives you hope in your ability to solve that problem and confidence that you can finally do it. You may go out and get a marriage counselor, you may go out and do a lot of things, but eventually you're going to get your act together. You know, when I first came into AA, I heard the rumor that we alcoholics were anti-professional. There is nothing farther from the truth. We alcoholics certainly can and do relate well to professionals.
The final thing, and I've heard a lot of experts say this too, is that AA fosters dependency. Can you think of anything farther from the truth? I've walked in and sat down at a table where there was a fellow not saying a word. He was kind of looking at his shoes under the table. You know what he was thinking? He was waiting for the rest of us to plot to blow up the nearest post office or to rob the nearest bank.
And after four or five meetings, he discovered we weren't going to do anything like that. So he took a chance on us and said a few words. And oh boy, we greeted him with kindness and understanding, and did we live to regret that. Because now he was talking like a magpie. You couldn't get him to shut up. Typhoons couldn't keep him home. You know, and you're really starting to get pretty badly battered.
So what we do is we sneak up behind him and say, we have chosen you to chair our next open meeting. Boom! I can't do things like that. They're going to throw cabbages and tomatoes and do all kinds of terrible things. And you know what we do. We tape broom handles to their back. We ghost read behind the curtains in the school gym. We do all of the work, but somehow or other we get them through that difficult situation and they learn that they can handle a whole room full of people without anything bad happening.
So frankly, we make whole people in AA. We don't turn out any bad news. And you know, as we go along, we grow wiser, more mature, and function better, and eventually we can handle life in a way that most other people can't. Most people can't handle this complex society we live in without chemical tinker toys. Alcohol, Librium, Valium, Equinil, Milton, Cerax, Serenal, Visceral, Atarax, Econol, Nembutol, Tunol, Carbitol, Dalamain, Qualud, and 181 other ones that I've left out.
And I'm proud to be in a room where there's 2,000 people who are well enough put together and have the courage of their convictions to be able to function without all of those chemical tinker toys. I think we represent a very small but very great majority of really intact human beings. Well, I went on talking about how AA really figured in my recovery, which I think is probably the most important aspect of my life.
But you know, a lot of people say, well, AA isn't a whole lot of fun. There are even meetings I've gone to that I didn't enjoy. In fact, sometimes I've walked out and looked up on the heavens and said, do I ever have to go to another meeting? And the clouds roll back and a voice booms down and says, you bet your bottom you do, because I still have plans for you and there's still things you've got to do.
But you know, as I read through my medical text, I really didn't see anything about medicine tasting good. I didn't see anything about it being attractive at all. The things I read is that any good medicine or any good treatment ought to be cheap, it ought to be available, it ought to work, and it shouldn't kill anybody. Well, you heard the chairman just before the meeting. We're going to pass the hat.
You know, in a day and age when you pay $75 to $150 for a 45-minute therapeutic hour, if you can figure that all out, you can get 3 or 4 hours of AA for 3 or 4 bucks and we'll even forgive you that if you haven't got it with you. So it is cheap. Now, back in my day, when people were staggering in off the streets and trying to get well, about 4 out of 10 got better. When we send people to prep schools like Chit Chat Farms and Hazelden and so forth, 7 and 8 out of 10 are getting better.
And you know, that's a whole lot better than the 4 tenths of 1% that my psychiatric colleagues are crowing about. So we've got a darn good track record. Now, again, every now and then at Guest House, we have somebody going to Taiwan or the Andes Mountains or Mexico City, and we run to get the international directory and we're overjoyed to see 59 groups around Mexico City, 4 on the island of Taiwan, and 2 on top of the Andes Mountains within convenient borough ride of anybody who wants to get there.
So it certainly is generally available.
[00:40:00]
And I want to stop on this particular comment. You're going to have to accept this on faith. We do a lot of things in AA on faith. But you know, in my 25 years of association with this wonderful movement, I have never heard of or seen anybody who died of an AA overdose. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor. Thank you for a beautiful message. We have a little token of appreciation here I'd like to present you with.
Lois, would you care to come up and say a few words? Good evening, everybody. It's great to be here with you another time. I don't know. Bill used to come to Akron every Father's Day. And after he passed away, I thought I'd like to do the same. I think I've missed a couple. But I'm hoping that I'll be with you next year. And I can't tell you how much seeing all your happy faces, feeling your gratitude and your love, how much it means.
And about gratitude, I spoke the other day, just a minute to say that gratitude is something that goes both ways. I'm so grateful to you for carrying on this wonderful message. And I give you all my love. Thank you very much. Thank you, Lois. Would you please all stand and join hands while the Serenity singer has the Lord's Prayer. O Lord, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Amen.
[00:47:21]
The Integral Law, First Relief, The Union, Farm, Competition, Health, Diversity, Equality, School, Counsel, Social, Racial, Cultural, Community, Dignity, The Union, The Law of Virginia, The Law of Florida, Membership, I Agnostics, Tax, Social, Cultural, Working with Others, Meeting, Utilities, Preparation,
[00:51:14]
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