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Source: Unidentified Historical Recording – Fellowship Review Recording 895 – Date Unknown.mp3 File: kermit-history-of-na-na-2003-archive-895.mp3 Duration: 00:42:46
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My clean date is September 6, 1982. That week I went to my first Narcotics Anonymous meeting and I haven't found it necessary to use since that day, which I am forever deeply grateful. And this is the history of N.A., and as a friend of mine said, it's not as Kermit sees it, it's as Kermit thought he saw it. So I give you that with a grain of salt, but I do the best I can. I'm very interested in N.A. history. I'm on chat rooms with people and I travel a lot and I talk to old timers whenever I meet them and I pick their brains and I want to know everything that they got.
I start out with Bill Wilson was a drunk. Most of you, probably anybody here in this room knows who Bill Wilson is. He and Dr. Bob got together and started Alcoholics Anonymous. And Bill Wilson woke up one night out of a dream and he wrote the 12 steps down, and this is what he wrote. And there's a few changes that were made, what they did with their literature. Bill also wrote the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and this is his first draft of that. It's a copy of it.
And this was sent to the group in Akron, Ohio, and they wrote notes and sent it to the group in New York City and they wrote notes and they sent it back to Bill and then he did a rewrite and that's the way the big book was written. And they also did that on the steps. And it says, some of the changes in here that I thought were pretty cool was, it says, humbly on our knees asked him to remove our shortcomings, holding nothing back. And they changed that to humbly asked to remove our shortcomings.
And it said, made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make complete amends to them all. And the cool thing that I like down here was, having had a spiritual experience as a result of this course of action, we tried to carry this message to others, especially alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. And what that told me was that Bill Wilson understood that once you have a spiritual awakening, you'd be of service to anybody. And the AA members in their primary purpose decided to change that to carry the message to the alcoholic, so we have carried the message to the addict who still suffers.
The first information about meetings of Narcotics Anonymous that we found is that in the 40s there was a guy named Houston Sewell who lived in Montgomery, Alabama, and he had a friend, he was an AA member, and he had a friend who was an addict and he was trying to help this guy get clean, and the guy never made it. But Houston moved to Lexington, Kentucky, and this is a city in America where they also happened to have the first detox in America, the first place addicts could go to get clean. And this was a federal detox, which meant you had to basically go through the prison system to even get there.
And Houston went there and talked to the director, a guy named Dr. Vogel, who becomes very important in our history for years, and asked him and suggested to him that you could use 12 Steps to help addicts, and Dr. Vogel took the idea and they started a meeting called Addicts Anonymous in the 1940s in this penitentiary using the 12 Steps of AA, using the word addict instead of alcoholic. There was a guy in New York named Danny Carlson, and he was a good addict like the rest of us. He went through this place Lexington nine times, which means he relapsed, he went back, he came back to New York, he relapsed, and on his ninth time he surrendered, and he went back to New York and started something called Narcotics Anonymous.
And the dates that we found on this is about 1949. And if you look in your literature it says N.A. as we know it began in 1953. Well, N.A. as we know it is a group in California, and every N.A. meeting in the world can trace itself back to that group in California. I'm getting a lot of feedback on this. Danny, his story shows up in a few early books, and if you look around you might be able to find some of them. The Addict, Monkey on My Back, and it talks about the N.A. meeting in New York.
At the same time in New York there was a young novice priest, and his name was Father Dan Egan, and he was helping, he got a mind to help addicts, and it made it his lifelong, you know, calling. And he helped them so much that this cop one time at the court said, what are you some kind of junkie priest? And he loved the name and it stuck, and since then he's never been known as a junkie priest. And the story of his life was written in a book called The Junkie Priest, and the third chapter is called Wednesday Night at the Y, and it describes a narcotics anonymous meeting like 1950, like two years, three years before N.A. as we know it started. And it's fascinating to read because it just sounds like a meeting. They got together, they had a little serenity prayer on the table, and they had a meeting.
[00:05:24]
So it's our belief that the seeds of addicts using the 12 steps came through these federal detox, and they sent out a newsletter called The Key, and The Key was a little newsletter and it talked about, you know, what was going on in N.A. and whatever, and their addicts anonymous meetings. And they sent them to addicts who had gotten out, so these little bulletins of recovery were going around the country. And some of them, they opened a second detox in Texas, and a lot of people from California were going down to that one in Texas, and we believe that the message was, you know, addicts using 12 steps was working there.
So, in the early 50s, there was meetings in California, they were called HFD or habit-forming drugs, and these meetings were like counseling sessions and, you know, what we called in the 70s TCs, torture chambers. The kind of places where you go to and they yell at you and, you know, if you act childish, they make you wear a toilet seat, you know, make you wear a baby's bib around your neck and stuff like that, so a lot of confrontive stuff.
The meeting, these people were hanging out, and there was a guy there named Jimmy Kennan, and his name, he's finally known as Jimmy K., and he was our founder, and there's a picture of him there, I hope you don't mind me putting up by the candle, but I think it kind of belongs, you know. And that old man standing next to the young kid, and the young kid was me with two years clean at the World Convention in New York in 1983.
And Jimmy was in that group of people in that first business meeting, and what you have in your hands is a Xerox copy from that original, and those are the handwritten notes on page one and two and three of the very first business meeting to start something called Narcotics Anonymous. And Jimmy made copies and gave them to my sponsor, and my sponsor made copies and gave them to me, and I made copies to give to you.
They had this meeting, and the interesting thing about these early meetings is that over the course of the first three weeks, everybody resigned. They gave people who were elected, and what it was about was powerful personalities. They had a lot of people trying to control it and make it their way. The very first meeting, they said they wanted to call themselves San Fernando Valley, which is a part of California, San Fernando Valley AANA.
And Jimmy said, you can't do that. AANA won't let you use their name. You can use the steps and adapt them, but you can't use the name. And they ruled them out of order, and they agreed that they would write to AANA World Services, and they wrote a letter, and they got a response back saying exactly what Jimmy said, that you can't use the name, but you can use the steps. So they changed the name from San Fernando Valley AANA to Narcotics Anonymous.
And one of the questions that had come up for many years was, our name is wrong. I mean, we should be Addicts Anonymous, right? I mean, if it's not a drug program but a recovery program, and narcotics is one brand of drugs. Well, in the 1950s, every drug was a narcotic. Marijuana was a narcotic. Cocaine was a narcotic. Heroin was a narcotic. Speed was a narcotic. So it made sense back then, and in the early 80s, we were talking about trying to change the name, but we realized nobody wanted to give up their t-shirts.
But we decided that the name was kind of like a brand name, like Coca-Cola. It just stood for something. The early 50s in N.A., I mean, N.A. was like really one meeting for many years, and this meeting ended up in a place called, it was the Schreyer's was the name of the alcohol detox place, and they nicknamed it the Schreyer's Dryer, so you dry out there. And the meeting was in there for a long time, and I heard that it was a show of hands meeting, so naturally I thought that meant you raise your hand and they pick you and you speak.
What I found out was the show of hands meeting was that they would say how many alcoholics in the room and they'd raise their hand, how many addicts in the room and they'd raise their hand. If there was more alcoholics, they had an A.A. meeting, and if there was more addicts, they had an N.A. meeting. So much for unity, right? So what happened was the meeting died. The only meeting in the world of N.A. died in 1959, almost to 1960.
[00:10:02]
And one of the early members went by there and found a little basket with a few dollars in it and no literature. She went and got Jimmy and Jimmy said, you know, we're going to start it again and we're going to stick by the traditions. So the traditions hadn't even been written until the mid-50s, so they had nothing to go by. The first meeting that they started, one of the early meetings that stuck was at a place called Moore Park.
And the most amazing thing was that at the World Convention in San Diego a few months ago, they had a meeting to open the convention. And they had like six or seven people that were in that original N.A. meeting, and they all had over 30 years clean. And, you know, you could just picture them like 30 years ago, 35, 40 years ago, sitting in this little meeting thinking, wouldn't it be cool if we had N.A. every night of the week?
And at that World Convention, they were sitting in front of 20,000 recovery addicts from around the world, all because these little group of people stuck it out and didn't give up, you know. The early 70s was the beginning of some of the first meetings outside of California. Most of the meetings were in California for a very long time. A couple of the people that were at that Moore Park meeting, the Magdalenas, two brothers and a sister, moved up to Northern California.
N.A. started in Southern California. And they started something called the Ad Center at Berkeley University, which is where all that 1960s wild stuff used to happen. The hippies started and all the protests started in Berkeley. And they started the Ad Center, and the Ad Center was a recovery place that sent people to N.A. meetings. And it was the first place that ever did that. And there was an explosion from there up and down the coast.
Little meetings started in different places. And in your packet there, in 1981, they listed all the meetings that they could find in the world. And if you look at it, there's like maybe two or three meetings in about 15 states, and that was it. There was, you know, I don't think there was anything outside. There might have been one or two outside the U.S. In the early 70s, something else happened. This guy Greg Pierce got clean, and he's passed away, and he was my sponsor.
And Greg was from a fairly well-off family. And most of the people in N.A. back then were like bikers and jailbirds and a pretty rough crowd. And he was like one of the first people with a car. Let's put it that way. And he showed up, and he had a sense of organization. He was intelligent. And he started to do a lot of work and get things organized. And one of the things he did was he wrote the N.A. Tree, which is our first service structure.
This is a Xerox copy of the first version of it. And basically what it was, it was a structure to hook up all the N.A. groups in the world. We had no structure at all. There was a board of trustees, and that was it, and an office. And the office moved around a lot. And for many years, it was in the back of this other guy's car, Bob Barrett. And it was in the back of his car. And his story is I found the only N.A. meeting in the world.
The N.A. Tree created N.A. as we know it. And it connected all these little groups. And there was groups in different places calling them, like I heard last night, intergroup. And we have area service. And these intergroups, like in Pennsylvania, they got a hold of this, and they immediately voted to adopt it. And they changed their names to area service. And they started building N.A. as we know it.
One of the other things that started in the early 70s was they had the first world convention. They didn't have anybody outside California. And it was pretty grandiose to think, let's call it a world convention, because, like, 150 people showed up. But it was the start of something. And what would happen is that since most everybody who came there was from California, and maybe after a couple of years, they'd get, like, one guy from Georgia or one guy from here, they would vote where the world convention goes.
And every year, it would go from northern California to southern California. And, you know, these guys had, like, big halfway houses. And they'd bring all their guys in and say, OK, you're going to vote for this way. Okay, you're going to vote for this way and they'd load the room up and so then they'd go back the other way and, you know, at the Seventh World Convention, I think it was, they had Northern California, it was a tie vote, right?
[00:15:02]
And there were some guys from Houston, Texas, and they threw in a token bid. They just said, well, we'll have it in Houston, two guys. speaking for their whole city. And the cool thing was the Northern people didn't want to vote for the Southern people, and the Southern people didn't want to vote for them. So they voted for Houston. And they all ended up, what the hell did we just do? They didn't realize what they just did was they made a miracle happen, because the World Convention moved out of this little area, and it came to Houston, Texas. And every time it went to a city, that city's recovery would explode, because they would meet people from different countries and different places, and they would see real, get a real piece of N.A. And they went from Houston, and then it went to Miami, and then it went to, like, up to Wichita, and Milwaukee, and New York City, and Chicago, and then Washington, D.C., and then to London, England, and so on. And this was one of the big growth things for N.A., was when the World Convention came to your part of America, because it not only affected that city, but three states all around, because everybody could get to it. At one of the middle World Conventions, there was this guy in Atlanta, Georgia, named Bo, and his city had, like, gotten up to, like, seven meetings a week, and he'd been clean five years, and he and every other people were talking about, where's our N.A. book? You know, where's our text on recovery? We need a book of our own.
And he went out to California to find out who was writing our book. Well, he got out there to find out that nobody was writing our book. There was some efforts to try to get something going, but nothing was happening. Greg was the only person that was trying to do anything. He'd even sent out a dope feed letter saying, the book's going to be written, you better send your stuff in, and he got no response. But Bo, Greg talked about the main players and the basic texts, and Bo was one of them, and he called Bo the P.T. Barnum. P.T. Barnum was the guy who created circuses, and that guy was a showman. He could get people involved and excited and stuff, and Bo was like that. And Bo showed up out there, and just, that's all he kept asking people was, who's writing our book? And they'd take him from one person to another, and the other person would say, well, why don't you go talk to Jimmy? And well, Jimmy said, take him to there, and finally, they took him to Greg, and Greg, you know, stopped and listened to him and talked to him, and wanted to know what he thought, and the two of them connected at a deep level, and they made a commitment to push on. And if you look at the history chart in the back there, there's a lovely history chart that talks about all the things that happened in N.A., and one of the things says that Bo sent Greg a postcard, and it says, you know, Dear Greg, um, Merry Christmas, send my love to Lois and the kids, guess who bought a typewriter?
That typewriter was the beginning of the basic text of Narcotics Mom, because Bo just started writing and writing and writing, and he showed me a piece of paper, I went to his house, and it, and it was dated from like 1978, it was like several years before the book even started, and it was just a few pages of his first notes, and it said on it, Many books have been written about the nature of addiction. This book primarily concerns itself with the nature of recovery. That idea is at the front of our basic text. Our basic text now says, and if you're an addict and you found this book, give yourself a break and read it.
Bo had that idea in his mind years before the book ever got written, and um, they created, they decided to hold elections, the conference time came for the elections, and they elected Bo as chairman of world literature, with the mandate to write a book on recovery for addicts, and what they did was they set up a workshop that would be in the middle of America, so it would be a place where people could come from both sides, and they had their first world literature conference, and at that conference, they discussed how the heck are we going to do this?
How are we going to write a book? We, you know, nobody was, there was maybe a couple of writers in this whole group, but they decided to take the little white book and use the headings of each one of the chapters, you know, that we read. Why are we here? How it works, more will be revealed, recovery and relapse, and they took each one of those, and they put them down on the ground, and they took every piece of input that they had gotten, pages and pages and pages of them, and they cut them up into little ideas, little N.A. ideas, little thoughts, little stories, little paragraphs, little sentences, and they looked at them, and they said, well, where does this fit? They said, well, this looks like it fits in recovery and relapse,
[00:20:05]
and this looks like it fits in how it works, and this looks like it'll fit, you know, and they took all these little pieces of paper, they put them in these piles, and then they took them, and they put them on paper, and they tried to set them up so they made some kind of sense, and then they wrote little sentences to connect them all. Basically, the basic text is a cut-and-paste job, and that's how the book got written.
They would put these things together, and then they would sit in rooms, and they'd do what they call a flow read, which means they would just read it quickly, just read it through, and people would sit, and they'd kind of make notes, and then after the reading, then they would talk about where did it stop, where did it work, where did it fall short. That was like second conference, and then the third conference they had in Memphis, Tennessee, and they took all the pages that they had gotten together, and they put it in a review form, and this is the review form of the basic text of Narcotics Anonymous, and they call this a gray book, and it's a rough draft of the basic text.
It's the first book-length piece of paper that we ever had at NA, and it was really cool, because it was set up with pages that were numbered on the regular page, and then on each line, so that when you read it, and you wanted to review it, you could say, on page 57, line 23, take out this, and add that, and it was real clear for how to fix it. It had some neat stuff that never got in. One was the timeline, which is what you have in the back of your hand out there.
It's got a physician's viewpoint, because the AA book had a physician's viewpoint, and that never made it into the book. There was also Spanish IP number one, you know, with how it works, and when they were making this, some really amazing things happened. Greg was living up at the top of America, and Memphis is down at the bottom of America, near New Orleans, and Greg had written the tradition half of the basic text, all the parts you read, and when you, not just, you know, the part that AA wrote, but the description of what tradition one is, and tradition two, and tradition three, and Greg had written that, but he was way up here, and they were way down there, and they were so busy getting it done, that they couldn't wait for him to come and bring it or send it, so they had a telephone conversation with him, and they had a woman who could type really fast, and Bo sat next to this woman and held the phone to her ear, and she typed for nine hours, and they translated the entire tradition half of the basic text of AA, and Greg read it and edited it in his mind, and he read it out, and this woman typed it, and when it got finished, they gave that portion to the board of trustees, to edit and approve it, right, and the board of trustees sent it back with not barely a single change in it.
The way it came out of Greg's mind is the way you read it today, you know, it's a miracle. Some of the neat stuff in there is a friend of mine, Gina from Nashville, wrote that line, everything we know is subject to revision, especially what we know about the tradition, and she was one of the first people to die from AIDS in NA. A friend of mine was typing one of the pages and it said, we dreaded the past and we were fearful of the future, and he just kept typing, and we weren't too thrilled about the present, and if you look in your book, that's the way it reads today, because it just worked, you know.
They took this book and they sent it out to the 600 known addresses they had, They took this book and they sent it out to the 600 known addresses they had, they had this guy Roger from New York call everywhere around the world where there could possibly be an addict. They called the treatment centers in Ireland and Germany and Australia and anywhere they could find, and they sent off these gray books, and all the information was boiled down, and it came down to two books.
This is the white approval form of the basic text of Narcotics Anonymous. It's the first half, the text portion, without the stories. And this is the first thing that I saw that was bigger than a white book. And I was thrilled, you know. And we just ran to the copiers and started making copies, you know, because, you know, we were giving people white books. We could give them a whole NA book here, you know.
And my ex was in Michigan at the time, and they were making like 400 copies at a time. They were just burning them. And the office sent them a letter, a cease and desist letter, you know, saying, Stop doing that. This stuff's copyrighted. You just can't make hundreds of copies. And they decided to make one more batch of 400, and they wrote on the top one and sent the top one to the office, and it said,
[00:25:01]
Recovery can't wait. And, I mean, that's what it was back then. A couple of months later, they had a workshop in Philadelphia, and they came up with the stories portion. And this is a rough draft of the stories of the basic text. And it came with a little sheet in it with the name of each story, and you were supposed to read them all and check off which ones you thought were cool and which weren't.
And they ended up basically taking every story that they had a copyright release for. Somewhere in there, there's a list of who some of the names of the stories are. Greg's was I Was Unique. Bob Barrett, who's got 46 years clean in Narcotics Anonymous, his story is I Found the Only NA Meeting in the World. A friend of mine, Charles K, is An Indian Without a Tribe. Fearful Mother was Betty, Jimmy's Wife.
And there's a list of some of the other ones. Those are the ones that I know of. The basic text was approved. And it was set up to come out as a first printing was to be a red limited edition. This one's mine. You can't have it. And each one's numbered, and you open it up, it says NA First Edition. And they numbered, and they're supposed to make 2,500. Of course, mine's 2,865, so I think they made a few extra.
Bo said that there was, you know, when you send a book to a printer, they usually make an overrun because it's easier to make a few extra and then, you know, sell them at a lower cost. So they probably made about 3,000. And what happened was when we approved the basic text, Jimmy, who was the office manager, said that he had a problem with two of the traditions. That in, I believe, the second and ninth.
One tradition says, What about our service boards, our committees? Are these things NA? And what we had approved of was it says, No, these things are not NA. They are services a group may or may not choose to utilize. Well, if you think about that, that NA is only the group that runs the meeting and the meeting that is run, period. Everything else is not NA. It puts a different light on service at other levels, you know.
And the other thing it said was that service boards and committees cannot decide, rule, dictate, or censor. Well, Jimmy said he wasn't willing to print the book as was. And rather than send it back to the fellowship for a group conscience, he got the chair of the board of trustees, the chair of the office board, the chair of the World Service Conference, all the big guys, together and asked them if they would sign off on agreeing to take those couple sentences out and print the book, and they did.
And they printed the book. And a lot of people were mad. A lot of people who had sweated over every single sentence in that book to be sure that it was true group conscience and to have one small group of people go in there and eliminate. So many years were spent putting it back in, taking it back out, putting it back in, taking it back out. The money to do the Red Limited, the money got ripped off by the book guy, as typical.
And finally they managed to get it done. And after they did that, they came out with a first edition basic text. And the process was basically about two years long from the writing to the approving to the printing, which is a miracle because they said addicts can't write. And if you read this book, this book has saved lives all over the world no matter what it's translated into, no matter how. And we had a second edition because we changed the word from we are recovering addicts.
We used to say we are recovered addicts. And a lot of people felt philosophy-wise that that wasn't right, so we changed it to recovering addicts. So we had to come out with a second edition. The third edition, I can't even remember, I'm so tired. We got to the third edition and we decided to change the little white book because you read the readings earlier today. And so we came out with a third edition, a little white book revised.
And when we did that, we had to change the basic text also, so the readings in there were consistent. The fourth edition, we were supposed to change the basic text for grammar, syntax, punctuation, and spelling, meaning because it was a cut-and-paste job with little kids' scissors and everything was kind of handwritten and stuff, that it didn't read right, and they felt that it could be written more clearly and so it read better.
[00:30:05]
And when they did that, they took a draft. off the computer to send it to the printer, and they took the wrong draft. And also, when the people were typing, you know how we use the same words over and over again, recovering, recovering, recovering, they would be reading at the top of the page, and they would look away, and their eyes would come back, and they'd be at the bottom of the page, and they'd skip the whole paragraph or two, or a page, and so the draft that came out was completely screwed up, and so we came out with a fifth edition.
That's the basic text, basically. It Works, How, Why, I'll go through these a little bit quicker, the basic text takes a little bit of time. This is a rough draft of the It Works, How, Why, this is the first draft that we came up with as a fellowship. The people at World Services decided that because the basic text was so jumbled that it would make a lot more sense to have one writer take all our information and write it.
The problem is that they made a decision to spend $50,000 of the fellowship's money to hire someone before they asked us, and they came to the World Service Conference and said, we cut this deal because the guy wasn't going to be able to do it unless we did it right now, and da-da-da-da, and we ended up getting a woman named Jessica Laird, who was recovering in AA, and wrote a book that sucked. It was terrible.
We finally referred to it as It Sucks, We and Them, instead of It Works, How and Why. This is my wife's copy, and my wife and I and a couple other people went to a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, to let them know that page one, step one, had the word drugs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 times on it, and if we're a program of recovery from addiction, that shouldn't be the focus. God, this was a good one.
But it wasn't different, it was always the same. Finally we had to admit that this thing had us whipped, and that we were ripped, and we really got whipped seven times on one page. She had a part where sharks were chasing us down the street, and that was a good one. What she did was take individual people's stories and try to make it as a whole fellowship book, and it just didn't work. My wife and I and a couple of my friends went to Charlotte, North Carolina, to a world business meeting right before this was going to be approved, or it was out to the fellowship for approval.
We asked them if we could talk with them about the book, and the world chair said, OK, we'll talk to you, and the world lit chair, the two of us will speak to you. We put some signs up and said, It Works meeting, 8 o'clock, and went out to dinner, and when I came back, I went to the room thinking that the two people who even cared to listen to us would be there. The room was filled with every world-level trusted servant, and they wanted to hear what we had to say.
We just opened the book, and we read out of it like that, and as we read, their mouths started to drop open, and they realized that it wasn't really good, but they had been really selling it to everybody because they had talked us into spending $50,000. It got shelled, and they even made the motion to not even put it on the table, and to just open it up and let the fellowship help work to write the book, and they came out with the final draft that you have today, and it was approved.
The Just for Today book, a lot of that work was done in the New England region, and I think that's the most advanced piece of literature that we have. One of the things that Greg used to talk about was, what you get clean on is going to be so much more than what I got clean on, so your recovery should go that much farther. It's like, when I got clean, they gave me a white book. When you got clean, you got a basic text, some people.
Other people got a basic text, a Just for Today, a step guide, and It Works, How and Why. If you start day one with that much information, then you're going to grow, and what you create and what you write has to be much farther along. Just for Today came out in its limited edition, it's a special purple limited edition, and each one is numbered, and this one's mine, you can't have it. Most of these things are up at auctions on the internet sites, getting pretty expensive.
[00:35:00]
The first one that came out was a purple Just for Today, and the cool thing was, this came out at the World Convention in Toronto, Canada, and everybody was abuzz, and they said, when you meet somebody, have them sign on their clean date and put their phone number, and then when you meditate that day, you can call them and wish them a happy birthday. If you guys get excited, you can get Just for Todays in there and get people to write on them, neat idea.
There was some questions about the book coming out in that purple color, because purple is a religious color, and a lot of people had a problem with it, you know, they say it looks like a little religious book, and if we're non-religious, so the office decided to do this cute little sunset cover, which a lot of people said, this looks like something Hazleton would put out, you know, some big recovery company that sells recovery literature.
So then we came out with the black and white version, with Just for Today all over it. The Basic Text has had two other special printings. One is the 5th edition, limited edition Basic Text, and this one was numbered, and they made 5,000 copies of this, and what they did was, it was really cool, they said the money was $35, and the money could only go to translate the Basic Text into other languages.
So that's what they used all the money for. And just recently, at the World Convention, they've come out with this new one, which is the 20th anniversary edition, and this is limited to 10,000, or 15,000, and what I want to do is, I want to get everybody here to sign mine, because this is the year this came out, and it's the year I came to Africa. The Step Working Guide, we wrote our own step working guides, you know, when I was in the early 80s, we just wrote stuff and made stuff up, and you know, our first step, we'd ask people to look through the first 10 chapters of the Basic Text, and write down the word addiction and everywhere that it was in there, and how does it affect you, and other questions, mostly, most of our questions on early steps was, you know, writing about what each key word meant, and what they meant to you, what does admitted mean, what does powerless mean to you, and that kind of stuff.
In the early 70s, Jimmy was giving out a thing called the Sponsor Sponsee Worksheet, which is what this is, this is a copy from Jimmy, of something called the Sponsor Sponsee Worksheet, and it's really good, and there's a lot of questions on every single step, and this got turned in to the people working on the project, and a lot of other people wrote and sent their little sponsor lists and things that we've written for years in for input on it, and then we came out with a step-working guide.
There's a really neat book that you can get from the World Service Office, it's called Miracles Happen, and it's the history of NA, and what it is, they bought Jimmy's archives from his wife Betty, who's very old, and they bought all these things that he had, and then they photographed a lot of them, and took pictures and put them in this book. One of the first things, in the first edition, they decided to do a little history of drugs, which a lot of people got very upset about, what is that doing in our NA literature, and what does that have to do with us, and so the next edition that they did took these pills out and the early drug reference stuff out.
One of the things that happened in the early 70s in America was that they changed the laws about alcoholics, and they said that alcoholics would no longer be looked at as criminals, but looked at as sick people who could be afforded treatment. Well, once that happened, the treatment industry happened. It created it because there was insurance money, and people could get paid for helping alcoholics.
Well, it also opened up centers where addicts could go to and get clean, and because of the 60s, and peace and love, by the 70s, a lot of addicts were starting to hit bottom, and they were starting to come into these little treatment places, and they were starting to come out, and that's in America where you see a lot of the first meetings are people who went through these different treatment places and found 12-step recovery, and then they heard about NA.
My sponsor got clean over the telephone. He was in Memphis, Tennessee in 1979, and he called the World Service office, and what he got was Jimmy's house, right?
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Because the World Service office ended up in Jimmy's home, and he called Collect. He called Collect every day for a week or two, and Jimmy 12-stepped him over the phone, and he told Joseph to go start a meeting. He said, go start a meeting, and he said, you hug everybody. He said, regardless of how they smell, or how they dress, or what the color of their skin is, or what their socioeconomic background is, if they've got money or no money, you hug everybody.
He said, because if you're not willing to hug everybody, you won't stay clean, and there'll never be another clean addict in Memphis, Tennessee. And Jimmy said, and if you have it in the back of your mind that you're going to get in their pants or you're going to get in their wallet, he said, you won't make it, and they'll never make it either because you'll alter the way you carry your message to them.
And my sponsor Joseph heard that, and he heard the idea of complete abstinence, that you don't take anything a day at a time, and he started meetings in Memphis, Tennessee. And now there's hundreds of meetings there today because of what that man told him over the phone. And we have a lot of cool stuff up here. There's flyers from around the world, from conventions around the world. There's flyers from numerous years of world conventions.
There's service material, the first service materials of different drafts of H&I handbook, P.I., literature, different things like that, different newsletters. The table over there has all kinds of buttons, badges, key tags from 50 different countries, and some of the earliest N.A. newsletters are back here. And we invite you to come up and take a look at all these things, and if you have questions on them, I'll be glad to continue to answer them.
The history of N.A. right now is, you know, the best things you can find is the miracles happen. And there was a book, there was a man named Bob Stone who was the manager of the World Service Office for many years, and he was let go, and he had cancer, and in his last two years he wrote a book called My Years with Narcotics Anonymous. And it's out of print, but Bo's talking about, has been talking with the people who are in charge of this project to get it started back up again.
So hopefully over the Internet you can get it, and it really goes year by year of what happened in N.A., and it's a brilliant, fascinating book to get. And with that, I'm finished with my talk on the history of N.A. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.