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Source: 1985 Montreal International Convention – Multi Speakers – AA IN THE YEAR 2001 AA in the Year 2001 – RS 06373.mp3 File: 1985-montreal-international-convention-multi-speakers-aa-in-the-year-2001-aa-in-the-year-2001-rs-06373.mp3 Duration: 01:18:33
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Bonjour. In our efforts to keep the schedule on track, we'd like to get started here so that we don't find ourselves burning the oil at the other end. Welcome to AA in the year 2001. This is the show that's designed to either put you into orbit or take you out, depending on your present point of view. My name is Bill Croak. I'm an alcoholic. We'd like to begin the program with a moment of silence, followed by the Serenity Prayer, in gratitude for all of the many, many recoveries that have occurred in AA over the past 50 years.
So if you would join me for a moment. God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen. We have a couple of mandatories here at the top of the program. First, it's just custom to point out the fire exits, but this room is incredible. There are almost as many fire exits as there are people here. So we shouldn't have a problem.
Oh, the mic is not on? Oh, okay. Sorry. Sorry. Okay, here we go. Thank you. I'd like to read the anonymity tradition for any non-AAs that may be present. There may be some here who are not familiar with our tradition of personal anonymity at the public level. Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion. We need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio, and television, as well as films.
Thus, we respectfully ask that no AA speaker, or indeed any AA member, be identified by full name or photograph in published or broadcast reports of our meetings. The assurance of anonymity is essential in our effort to help other problem drinkers who may wish to share our recovery program with us. Our tradition of anonymity reminds us that AA principles come before personalities. Now, there was one other announcement.
All of these meetings, as you probably know and have heard if you've been to any meetings previously, are being taped so that if you are interested in obtaining a tape of this particular meeting, they'll be available at the… There's a tape sales booth over in the Convention Center which can then be brought back here to be autographed by our speakers depending on how… depending on how impressed you are.
This should be an interesting program in that it will be a look into the future and looking back on the last 50 years, it just sort of boggles the mind to think about the possibility of this program over the next 50 years. I'm involved in the publishing side a little bit with AWS and statistics just really blow your mind in terms of the length of time it took for the first million copies of the big book to be sold and how big a deal was made out of that.
and how big a deal was made out of that. And then the second million and the third and this year, the five millionth copy will be or has been sold and it's interesting, when we talked about it, it was, well, gee, we just did four million a short time ago so it's really not that big a deal. And to look ahead to the year 2001, it's just… I'm grateful that the program is out of directed, so to speak, because I think we're going to really need that.
Our speakers are going to discuss this subject from differing points of view. Our first speaker, Sally R. from Birmingham, Alabama, is going to talk about how she sees AA in the future
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if we do not abide by the traditions, which will be interesting. Bob P. from New York will then discuss AA from the point of view of the early days and how he views it evolving into the future. And finally, Dennis F. will talk about the subject in terms of our cooperation or non-cooperation, if you will, with the professional community. So without further ado, I would like to move along and turn the meeting over to our first speaker, Sally R. from Birmingham.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Sally Roy, and I'm an alcoholic. I'm so glad Bill used the term mind-boggling. I thought that I was the only one that talked like that, and I got that term from my children, and that's really the term that comes to my mind when I think about AA and the tremendous growth and where we've come and where we're going. It is indeed mind-boggling. When I received my loving invitation from Sarah to participate in this very special birthday party, which marks our golden jubilee year of Alcoholics Anonymous, which we recovering members and our families are celebrating with gratitude from around the world, I was awed with my assignment.
To predict the future takes some understanding of the past, and trying to perceive the world and how it has changed since the year 1935 until this day 50 years later is not possible for me as I was one of those yet-to-be-born alcoholics at that time. But I can trace my own journey of recovery in the program, and if you'll go back with me for a little while, perhaps we can see some of the trends of growth and change that might project the future.
In 1963, I was confused and hurt and frightened. I had two small sons, a husband, and a good home. But I couldn't control my drinking, and it was beginning to interfere with everything that I held dear. One morning after Jim left for work, I called Alcoholics Anonymous, and two women came to our home that morning to talk, to bring some AA literature, and to invite me to go with them that night to an AA meeting.
I was introduced to the one-on-one 12-step call. In 1963, there were only two groups in Montgomery, Alabama, and I went to the downtown group's Thursday night's closed meeting. I remember little about that meeting. I do remember climbing a very long flight of stairs. I remember a few women and a notable absence of young people. I also remember the sincerity and obvious caring, and probably most importantly, I remember the complete acceptance without questioning that I received.
It was not important to anyone who I was or who my husband was or what he did, only that I was there. In this manner, I experienced the tradition of anonymity for the first time. I feel it important to note that at that time there were no treatment centers in our area. There was what we called the AA cell in the county jail, and I know my traditions well enough before I get slapped down to know that we do not affiliate with outside causes, enterprises, and don't lend our name, but nevertheless it was called the AA cell.
What it was, when the drunk decided he had had enough and the AA folks and he thought that he couldn't stop drinking on his own without help, he would turn himself into the county jail and the AA members would give the jailers enough whiskey to wean him off or detox him. And once so committed to treatment, he couldn't get out until the process was completed. Laughter AA didn't take with me in 1963.
I wasn't that bad yet, and I hadn't hurt enough, but the seeds had been sown, and I found myself some eight years later, so sick, terrified, full of guilt and self-loathing and about to lose my children and my husband and my home. I knew where to turn, and once more I found the acceptance without questioning. What I was was the issue, not who I was, and they welcomed me back. In 1971 there were a few more women in the program and younger members, and by young I'm talking about 28 and 29-year-olds.
I don't remember the 18 or 19-year-olds at that time,
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but they started coming soon afterwards. And that year AA in Montgomery, Alabama, grew from two groups to five and there were meetings almost every night of the week. We began to hear talk about treatment centers for the first time. Some of those who had a particularly hard time with relapse would drive a couple of hundred miles to Statesboro, Georgia, where a recovering alcoholic doctor and his recovering wife, who was also a nurse, would treat alcoholics for a month or so in their own home, much like Bill and Lois had done years before.
This hospital was later Willingway Hospital and is now the blueprint for many treatment centers that have been built in the South. This same year, shortly after I began attending AA, I arrived at a meeting one night to learn that Bill Wilson had just died. Now, I didn't know enough about the fellowship at that time to really fully appreciate the significance of this, but I do remember the grief and the true sense of great loss that was shared by all.
It was a very somber, sad occasion. Many of the members were tearful. We all listened quietly to a scratchy voice on an old tape recording of Bill's, and I remember the comments. It'll never be the same, and the questions, Can we survive? I learned the traditions from the tradition meetings in our area. I learned that my recovery and the recovery of all who follow depend upon the unity of the group and that there are no leaders, but the ultimate authority is the loving God as he expresses himself in our group conscience.
I learned that anyone who expresses an interest in stopping drinking qualifies for membership, that we seem to thrive in a state of enforced poverty. I learned that anonymity is to be strictly adhered to and that there are no official spokespeople for AA, that this reassures those of us who might have stayed away from AA out of fear of being identified, even inadvertently, and discourages any AA member from seeking personal recognition.
I also heard the reasoning behind the idea that the known member who drinks again might give others reason to doubt AA's effectiveness. Although after our track record of the past 50 years and the one million-plus alcoholics whose sobriety is founded in AA, I doubt the third reason is as vital to our survival today as it was back in the days of the first 100. Incidentally, today in Montgomery, Alabama, there are 28 groups of alcoholics anonymous which meet a total of 49 times each week.
As far as treatment centers, with a third of our new members coming from this source, they cannot be overlooked. There are now four primary treatment programs in this area which house almost 100 beds with a new 60-bed facility to be built in the very near future. The growth of Alcoholics Anonymous has been a most phenomenal thing. I remember the 45th anniversary of AA in New Orleans when Marty Mann made her last talk, and Marty was the first woman on record to get sober in AA.
In New Orleans at a women's meeting, she told the story of driving from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1939, after a series of articles about AA had been published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Bill and Lois, Marty, and a few other AA members were going to meet with what they thought were going to be a handful of people. When they finally arrived in the middle of the night, they found a house overflowing with those desperate for the message of hope that had been carried to them.
She related how Bill turned in utter amazement and said something to the effect of, wouldn't it be grand if one day we could travel across this country and find one meeting like this in every major city? At this point, Marty paused and looked over the thousands in the auditorium who had come from all over the world to celebrate our 45th anniversary, and she said, and just now, just look at the damn thing.
At the first regional forum in Atlanta, Georgia in 1975, Dr. Jack Norris addressed us at the closing meeting that Sunday morning. He did a magnificent job of comparing the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous with another movement which was born the same year. He very simply compared the philosophy and growth of AA with that of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, the one movement based on purity, honesty, unselfishness, and love that says our common welfare must come first.
that says our common welfare must come first, that we may refuse none who wish to recover,
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and that we are responsible to no authority but to the group conscience through which a loving God speaks, with that movement based on the theory of a master race determined to conquer all and to erase another people from the earth. And he contrasted the phenomenal growth of AA, and we see this for ourselves here this weekend, with the ultimate and complete destruction of Nazi Germany within just 10 years.
There are now almost 63,000 registered AA groups in the USA, Canada, and 114 other countries, and probably an equal number that aren't registered. This represents well over a million who have found sobriety, and includes many more million family members who have been touched since 1935. Where will we be in the year 2001? In 1983 and 84, I was privileged to represent my area as a delegate to the General Service Conference. Attending the conference those two years and watching our trusted servants in the General Service Office in action is a reassuring experience. They are the guardians of our traditions. The traditions and concepts regarded by the conference will keep AA sound and safe for the generations that will follow it. Incidentally, during your term of office, any anonymity breaks in your area that are noted by anybody are sent to the General Service Office, and GSO will send them back in term to the delegate who is currently serving in that passage. I think in the two years that I served as delegate, I had all of five anonymity breaks at the level of press. These were all handled in turn by people at a local level in Alabama, Northwest Florida. At the conference in 1984, I was asked to be a presenter on a panel entitled, How We in AA are Responding to a Changing World.
At that time, I referred to us as having a case of growing pains. I mentioned the enormous increases in our membership along with the attending problems and our renewed efforts to cope with them within the framework of our traditions. We have now established area and district committees, regional forums and workshops at all levels. We communicate with the courts, the treatment facilities, and with all sources from which our kaleidoscope of membership comes.
In that presentation, I mentioned also the tendency of some AA members to delegate basic AA 12-step work to treatment center staff who are frequently non-AA oriented. With the proliferation of such centers, it many times is more convenient to give directions to such a center rather than take the time and energy for the old-fashioned one-on-one 12-step call that saves so many of our lives. Cautioning the AA membership, as I see it, of the frightening and chaotic aftermath that could result is not enough.
Personnel are not always fully informed and therefore have no concept of the AA tradition. Education along these lines is needed and, if this were possible in AA, mandated. However, there are not enough informed and educated individuals in AA to do this on a one-on-one basis in all the courtrooms and in all the treatment centers and halfway houses that are springing up like mushrooms. Our AA traditions are the bedrock of our survival and we must under no circumstance abdicate them, nor their vital function to any treatment staff member. They are the sole guidance for AA relationships with each other and relationships with the world outside. And that world outside is, in most cases, hopelessly uninformed as to the AA concept and we fall way back in our progress to educate it through communication.
A few do and do it well while maintaining our anonymity at the public level. In keeping with the spiritual philosophies of AA, we try to connect with the outside in unity, but actually we are dragging our feet. We cannot afford to do this. We stand to lose precious lives. More individual AA members need to be prepared, educated, and authorized by group conscience to go into the professional community, which presently is handled almost entirely through committee or certain volunteer group membership. As individuals, we need to be trained to communicate
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with that world out there, mindful of our own anonymity and that of each other. We need to do it at their level of understanding to help them to understand what the traditions are about. They, for the most part, are looking for different modalities of treatment, new, quicker, and more predictable. And it is our job to educate them, to link them to us in unity. And this, as I see it, is our responsibility and not theirs.
There's another story about Marty Mann that I enjoy hearing. Marty was the founder and later the executive director of the National Council on Alcoholism. At a forum in Washington on the 20th anniversary of the council's founding, some 50-odd celebrities went public en masse in the ballroom of the Shoreham Hotel. The chairman identified them by name and achievement, and then that we have one thing in common. We are all alcoholics. The audience screamed its approval, and then the chairman asked those in the room that were also alcoholics if they would stand, and about 95% of the audience stood up. Marty's classic remark was, my God, after 20 years, we're still talking to each other. And that's what we're trying to do here.
At the 20th AA convention in 1955, Bill Wilson offered the following resolution. Be it therefore resolved that the General Service Office of Alcoholics Anonymous should become, as of this date, July 3, 1955, the guardians of the traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, the perpetuators of the world services of our society, the voice of the group conscience of our entire fellowship, and the sole successors to its co-founders. The resolution was then unanimously adopted, and the concepts for world services support fully the concept of responsibility for enlightening a changing world through conscious action and training of more AA members for this work. The first concept simply states that the final responsibility and the ultimate authority for AA world services should always reside in the collective conscience of our whole fellowship. And the second, when in 1955 the AA groups confirmed the permanent charter for their general service conference, they thereby delegated to the conference the complete authority for the active maintenance of our world services, and therefore made the conference, accepting for any change in the 12 traditions or the Article 12 of the conference charter, the active voice and effective conscience for our whole society. And having seen the conference in action, I know that AA will be alive and well, ready for my children and grandchildren in the years to come. I see in the 21st century the widespread dissemination of information concerning our society and the traditions by which it survives, without disturbing our spiritual foundation of anonymity, one iota. This dream was born in 1935 and was viewed as an understanding of how we AA members connect with each other in unity and then in time would connect in harmony with the world out there through our service committees, bringing them the news of the real strength of our recovery.
Today that world is beginning to grasp something of this. I see the year 2001 as one of strict adherence to the basics, to the traditions with special emphasis on the spiritual concept of anonymity. And I can see an outsider in the year 2001 asking a member of the fellowship, just how does AA work? And I can hear the answer echoing through many years, it works just fine, thank you. And for that we are all responsible. Thank you very much.
Sally, thank you so much. That was thoughtful, it was stimulating, thought-provoking, and I was pleased to hear that AA in the year 2001 sounds familiar. It's interesting that I was thinking about, having just read Bill's book Pass It On, that
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all of the years of agony and agonizing over passing the torch from Bill and Dr. Bob to the individual members, and now having made a pun earlier about being in orbit, but in fact we have been for some years, been orbiting, so to speak. And with the track record that we've got, I think I have every reason to believe that what Sally has depicted for us in the future is going to come to pass. Next, since this group seems to be applying pinpoint precision to their respective timing, our next speaker is going to be Bob Peay from New York, who will discuss AA from the point of view of the early days and how he views AA in the future, into the year 2001. Bob?
Good morning, everyone. My name is Bob, and I'm an alcoholic. Hi, alcoholic! And I'm delighted to be here to see old friends. It's very heartwarming, and maybe I'll make some new ones before I leave. I want to thank the committee for asking me, and Bill for chairing, and also the pleasure of meeting my co-panelists. With the early history of AA, I do go back several years. You know, by looking at me, I've been someplace a long time, right?
And a lot of those years have been in rooms, these anonymous chambers of love, with people like you. AA was just 17 years old when I attended my first meeting. I was a youngster. I didn't always look like this. I used to have long, blonde curls, right? And I had a little trouble, as Sally did in the beginning with getting sober. I attended my first meeting outside of Chicago, Illinois, on the North Shore in Winnetka. And they met in Holmes in those days. And these men picked me up in a car and brought me out to this home in Winnetka and sat me in the living room. The wives were in the kitchen making coffee, and one of the guys says he looks like I was on that night, the center of attention, the newest man. One of the guys says he looks like he needs vitamins, and somebody else says he looks like he needs the hospital.
One guy said he looks like an alcoholic to me. And right away I hated him. But they were very visible, and they were carrying the message then at that time, which I'm still trying to do to this day, and I hope in the year 2001 also. Many times you hear cliches in AA with blind faith. You've got to take this on blind faith. I don't particularly like cliches because I don't think they always speak the truth.
And I don't think that cliche blind faith speaks the truth either. You could see them and hear them and talk to them, and they were very visible. There was nothing blind about it, and they were glad to share. When I came in, some of the first hundred people were still alive, marvelous, always giving, always loving, and right up to the end. And some of the very early people who've been with the Oxford group, of which we are a spinoff, were still alive, and they were also very, very active. I was sponsored by a man who'd been sponsored by Bill W. I feel that I'm a first generation AA, not that that makes us any different. We all stay sober according to principle.
But I have wonderful memories, and sometimes I get them out of the trunk, and I look at them, and I enjoy my memory, and those early days of getting sober were part of it. I think that coming to Alcoholics Anonymous is an admission of a failure at life, and I fail as only an alcoholic can in all of the levels of my personal life, certainly emotionally and certainly spiritually, which I'll talk about a little later. But coming here with A little later. But coming here with no options. We used to say I saw the handwriting on the
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floor. But coming here with no options was an ideal way for me to come in. I think that a reservation, and this is an observation through many years, and a reservation is one of the most dreadful, vicious aspects of a slip. They say resentments are number one offenders, but as we think about it, a reservation, there's almost no defense against this. You know, we used to call a reservation one of the three R's of a slip, remorse, resentment, or reservation. But against a reservation, maybe there's one more drunk. That doctor straightened me out the last time. Maybe there's one more detox center. Maybe I can get away with it one more time. And I think that a reservation has washed more alcoholics out to an alcoholic death than almost all the resentments in the world. I don't recommend resentments, but they can remind you you're an alcoholic, right? You can use them in a positive way. You should say to yourself, who gets this mad? Well, an alcoholic gets this mad, that's who. And very often you can use them in a positive way to remind you of where you came from and where you don't want to return to.
Finally, I came, I had a disastrous, after some years of nibbling and quibbling around the program, I was in Chicago at the time, and we have some wonderful Midwestern friends here. I used to be the late, late show on Michigan Avenue, right? I was king of the near north side, and some dreadful disaster. I ended up with a psychotherapist there, and a wonderful old Freudian by the name of Eduardo Weiss, who practiced on North Michigan Avenue. Dr. Weiss spoke to me in strange tongues, in addition to the Viennese accent. He spoke to me about integrity, self-respect, stop conning, stop being conned, stop shooting angles, right? And I thought, what's this got to do with my being a drunk and an addict?
And for this alcoholic, it had everything to do with it. What he really was talking about was our fifth chapter, and he got out of ignorance or stupidity, I didn't know it. He was talking about honesty. Well, honesty is a quality of character. And this was tremendously important in my early recovery. Booze made a bum out of me. I'm not a liar, and I'm not a thief, but if you give me a drink, I am both. And through principle that Sally talked about in these rooms, if this is a word, you debummified me. And it was becoming debummified through principles that I began to get sober. I finally ended up at the dreadful emergency room experience, which we're all familiar with. It's a rotten illness. You get so you hate it, right? It makes martyrs out of wives and victims out of children, and it's lousy.
Well, anyway, I ended up, all the lousy things happened, even if it happened to any other alcoholic. And I finally ended up one morning with a very, very serious hospitalization, and I came back. This young doctor sedated me and said, you're going to spend a few days with this Mr. Pope. And he said, I'm going to put you in that self-service elevator there, and you push the button. When you go upstairs, tell the nurse that you want to be admitted.
Well, I thought that I was going to a nice men's medicine ward where guys were having their gallbladder out, and so I got in the self-service elevator, and the door opened, and I was standing in the doorway of a locked ward, and something went out of me, something primitive like, and I thought, so this is luncheon at 21. So this is February in Palm Beach. And I came back to those early AA's then because I had no place else to go, and I don't apologize for it. Where does a drunk come? A drunk comes to these meetings, and here they all were. In those days, we didn't have sponsors, we had drill sergeants. And I said to my sponsor, I said, listen, I've got an opinion about something. He said, an opinion? He said, when we want you to have an opinion, we'll give you one. And you know something, for this alcoholic, this was tailor-made, absolutely tailor-made, because if they'd allowed me to do it my way, which I didn't have, I certainly would have messed it up.
Some guy woke up one morning and said, everything is relative. Not if you're an alcoholic.
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There are certain absolutes, and one of them is the first drink. That's an absolute. There's nothing relative about it. One of two things happen to us. We either die or we get better, and getting better means no drinking. These are absolutes. And I had to have them in the beginning. I had to have these concepts and these principles, because without them, I certainly, with this alcoholic mind, I would have messed it up. Because even in the days when I didn't drink, I still thought alcoholically. And I had like this illusion of clarity, and it wasn't there. I was crazy as hell. Even without the stuff, right? And when I came in with those early days, they looked at me, and they were debating, is this a nut who drank or an alcoholic who was nuts? And they were trying to clarify this. But again, it's the everlasting tribute to this program. Not only did it stop drinking, but it began to bring emotional balance into my life. Again, the first hundred were still around then.
It was a very exciting time. I'm a first generation AA, as I said. We were in such awe of sobriety. My God, if anybody was sober five years, we sat at their feet, and we rattled all over the subways and buses to get to me. We weren't put-down artists. We were open and receptive. We had this tremendous respect for one another. My sponsor used to say we should genuflect to one another. I think that's a little strong. But you get the message. And Bill was always available with all these wonderful concepts, and really with such tremendous clarity. It was marvelous. We used to have some small meetings from time to time, and Bill was leading one night, and a woman got up and told this story, and he was leading the meeting as Bill is today. And Bill got up afterwards, and he says, isn't it marvelous? Out of such lunacy there comes such clarity. And it was true. I did all the other things that we're supposed to do, the rot becoming active with the group, starting with dumping out the garbage and making the coffee, and this marvelous thing began to work. But it began to work again because of principle. We used to say get self out of the center, get principle in the center, and then this thing began to take off. I just passed my 29th year of sobriety since the summer of 1956. I've not had a drink or a drug. However, I've not had any trouble since then, but I've had a lot of trouble with myself, which explains why I still remain very, very active with the meetings and attending. I still want to remain teachable. Ignorance has been a tremendous liability to me, not only in my drinking, but also to my recovery.
In the steps when they talk about the things that ambushed us into alcoholism and misery, pride, anger, lust, sloth, gluttony, and of all the rest I put ignorance or stupidity. And this, again, has gotten me in as much trouble as any character defect in the world. In the beginning I didn't know I had the illness. I didn't know it was the first drink. I didn't know the awful things were going to happen, but I paid the price, the same as if I knew.
And God help those alcoholics out on the street today who are still active. They may not know they've got this illness, and they may not know what's going to happen, but it's going to happen the same as if they knew. It's been the clarity and the understanding of the program that's been so tremendously important to me, and it's kept me so tremendously active. There were changes, and I'm getting to be an old man now, and I'm kind of resistant to change. We used to have, the word used to be an honest desire to stop sober, to stay sober. They thought that was a little redundant, so they dropped it. Maybe we'll let them have that. One thing I didn't particularly like was when they changed the twelfth step, they used to say, having had a spiritual experience, they changed it to awakening. And I think somehow this has diluted it. It's watered it down. And again, with certain absolutes, there were marvelous, gigantic spiritual displacements at that time. And again, we saw them and heard them in many cases, my own included. They happened like over a weekend, and it was just a gigantic, we used to call it a personality change. And I do think that the word spiritual experience was a little closer to, they always used to say we should have goals, even though we don't achieve them, we can have some ideal. After all, we share experience, strength, and hope with each other. We could hope for this spiritual experience. And to changing it somehow, however the group conscience wanted to change it, and that we must have unity, so I'll go along with them. But those spiritual experiences were marvelous, and of course those people gave us the principles of the program in the beginning. There are also people
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around us who say, apropos of principle, I don't believe, I'm atheistic, or I'm agnostic, what difference does it make, I'm staying sober. What they're not aware of is that they are relying for their sobriety upon people who do believe, or did believe. Those people who brought us this program, the traditions, the steps, they believed. So whether we believe individually or not, it isn't important. We're leaning all over them for our sobriety.
The years have gone on, I've grown up in AA, and I've started to grow old here. I thought that it would be a bummer, but it hasn't, because in the worst things there was always principle to lean on here. But for this alcoholic, some of the lessons to be learned sober have been unbelievably painful. The whole program to me is a matter of self-confrontation through steps and the group level through tradition. But the whole program has been a matter of confronting self. It isn't what was the matter with mama or papa or the world or this or the boss, it's why can't I accept it or transcend it or go around it. And this has been a difficult thing for me. Not hard, but difficult. There are people who say that it's very difficult to stay sober. This is a snap. Crawling around on my hands and knees in my own blood, looking out for the vice squad. This was tough, right? This is easy here. I'll take it any time.
When I was about two years sober, my sponsor was very active with Marty Mann. Dennis was head of the Alcoholism Information Center of New York and a superb human being. He died and I thought that my world would come to an end, but he had plugged me enough into the traditions and principles here that I didn't waver. One day over coffee, he looked at me and the way that he said it, it went right through me. He said, don't ever pick up a drink again, Bob. And it was one of those things that will electrify us, we hear from time to time. There's a ring of truth in it. So I was launched in that time and it began to work. I've tried to be available wherever I can. I must remember, as Sally touched on, in the year 2000, our primary purpose is to stay sober. Our primary purpose is to stay sober and to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety. I think that this one-to-one that goes on between us, this is the important thing. That AA itself never becomes such so institutionalized that the goal becomes the perpetuation of AA. And Bill tried to guard against this in the traditions. It is almost foolproof, but it's amazing how a human being can mess up a simple message. But I think as long as we stick the kernel of it, this is what we're here for, these circles of love to carry the message to the alcoholic who still suffers. It's extraordinary to see the young people come into AA. This is thrilling.
I don't always agree that there is a difference. I don't think there's anything like a 20-year-old resentment and a 60-year-old resentment. There's resentment. I don't think there's anything like a 20-year-old anger and a 70-year-old anger. There is anger. And I don't always think that it's the 20-year-old rushing in here. As my friend Brian says, it's the 70-year-old grandmother who comes in here horribly beaten up by this thing, who's just as important as anybody else in the room. There's no one in the room who's more important than anybody else. This is a democracy. And a single any group or people or individual, this is not AA. My sobriety is more important to me than anybody else in this room. And I don't like a hierarchy of values or anything of the sort. We're all important, young, old, middle-aged, and the marvelous number of women that are coming into the program now. And I love the marvelous democracy that goes with this program. Now, dealing with alcoholics sometimes is difficult because where you've got three alcoholics, you've got four opinions. But thank God somebody does transcend those meetings. They used to say our business meetings were like a full moon over the local nuthouse. But somehow out of this insanity, again, as Bill said, there comes such sweetness and clarity. When I look, we head to the year 2001. It's only 15 years from now, and there haven't been that many changes in the past 15 years. Thank God the steps are real.
Thank God the steps are written. Thank God the traditions are written. And I really don't see that many changes.
[00:45:00]
There may be one or two other things that may be important to us, but I think that we're going to go on. And as Bill said, for as long as we realize that our fellowship was God-given, rather than anything that we invented or created, for as long as we try to increase in our help those people who need help, for as long as we try to perfect and speak the language of love, for as long as this, our fellowship will sponsor, will prosper, and we'll have our rendezvous with destiny and with a higher power.
God bless you. Thank you. Thank you, Bob, so much. That was just marvelous. In the context of this subject matter, the year 2001, which conjures up vast, complicated designs of telecommunications and difficult challenges and so on, I think the purity of what Bob said really struck me with great force. And it's kind of like there's nothing new under the sun when you really come right down to it. It just reminded me of my early days in the program where I had a sponsor who was right out of that school.
You know, they'd sit down and shut up and don't pick one up school. But I can remember going through litanies of job problems, and he said, I got the wife and the boss and I got a business trip and a thing and a thing and a thing. And the guy, he put a little inflection on it that was just imprinted on my head, and he said, well, don't drink. And I'd say, well, Jesus, this guy doesn't get it. You know, I got all this stuff.
I just really appreciated Bob nailing that one because I really firmly believe it will be forever thus. And that includes into the year 2001. It's kind of the analogy to me is I my personal ultimate retreat position is no matter what I screw up in terms of steps and friends and non-friends and so on. If I don't pick one up today, I got a chance to play. And I think the same thing can be said for the program itself.
If we keep our eye fixed clearly on that first step and do not pick up a drink today, we will all be here in the year 2001 to deal with whatever the grand issues of that moment might happen to be. Wonderful presentation. For our next and final presentation, we have Dennis F. from Washington, who is going to be talking about the subject A in the year 2001 from the standpoint of the professional community.
So without further ado, Dennis. Thank you. My name is Dennis, and I'm an alcoholic. Boy, this is great. I know that these people here have been to one of these before, but I'm one of the newer people around. And so this is my first time at an international. And they gave me the opportunity to do the thing that alcoholics probably really shouldn't do, and that's play around in the future. And George D. is here from San Diego.
About two years ago, I was called and asked to be on a panel about cooperation with the professional community. And George and I were talking over the phone. We'd never met before. We sort of said, well, what are you going to talk about, Dennis? And I said, how about the future? And George said 2001. And we're sort of the people who started this project. And then after we did it at the Pacific Regional Forum, Pacific Regional AIDS Service Assembly in San Diego, then somebody told Sarah Price about it.
And so here we are. And it was a completely different thing than it was when George and I did it. And George said to me, don't screw it up this time, Dennis. That's the last thing he said before I came up here. Because I'm feeling kind of brash and full of it, I have two presentations today. And I just thought I'd wait and see what happened. And then since I was the last person to speak, I'm going to give you the newer one as opposed to the older one.
Because I sort of got carried away in this whole business about thinking about the future.
[00:50:07]
When I did this presentation in San Diego, Bill Moore, who at that time was a delegate from California North Coastal Area, said we should subtitle it Beam Me Up, Scotty. So I am going to talk a little bit more about some of the future fun things. And then at the end, I would like to go back and refer to our history. It's interesting that without having ever met before, we're all sort of beaming together on the same direction.
And probably all of you are as well. My projection for the future is positive for Alcoholics Anonymous. So if anybody wants to hear about doom and gloom, I'm sorry, but I don't have any. I feel very positive about what's going to happen. I think that the first thing that came to my mind when I thought about 2001 was how many of us are there going to be. And since I've always wanted answers, I called the General Service Office and asked them what they projected for 16 to 17 years from now.
And nobody would touch it. They just said, you know, our experience shows, da-da-da-da-da-da. And then they said, go read the pamphlet, the AA member, which Sally mentioned. And it says in there approximately one million of us at this point. And unofficially, though it doesn't say that in the pamphlet, but I hear often, unofficially many people say that maybe there are two million of us in North America.
Maybe. Another figure that seems to be floating around at this point is that we have apparently doubled our group population in the last seven years. So because I have a calculator, and since the GSO wouldn't do it, I decided to do it, my predictions are that in 2001, I predict, and I think conservatively, that we will have officially five million members. Now, that's demographics, you know. The more you grow, the more you grow.
And if you double, and then you have to double what you double. So I think we could have five million. Probably unofficially, that would mean eight million, those people who really don't answer surveys, participate in groups, but sort of hang out and stay sober and wander around and are full-fledged members, but we don't really know it too clearly. We don't even know it too clearly about the ones that are in the groups.
Give or take a million, let's say, you know, five million, give or take a million, that's still a lot of drunks. What that would mean in a local district or a local city that maybe, let's say, had 100 groups in meetings, is that 16 years from now, if you've got 100 now, 16 years from now, we'll have 300 to 400 groups in meetings. 16 years from now, if you've got 100 groups and you have 1,000 people in those groups, you're going to have maybe 5,000 people.
And you can take your own local number of groups per week kind of thing and do those figures yourself. And I don't think you'll find that I'm too far off. So I predict, I believe, and I said this in San Diego a year and a half ago, that the major thing that we will face in Alcoholics Anonymous, and Sally's already said it and Bob has alluded to it, that we face growth. The whole point, really, of talking about the cooperation of the professional community was not and is not to talk about ways to get more members because we simply don't need to do that.
We don't have to go out and drag them in. And that's not the purpose of this talk, I'd like to say, from the beginning. A third of our members in this pamphlet, the individual AA member said in the survey that they come to us by referral from third parties. So a third of a million is a lot of people and a third of the 5 million 16 years from now is a lot of people and a lot of referrals. Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs or whoever else doesn't like the drunk and doesn't want to deal with them and wants them to get well sends them to Alcoholics Anonymous.
Maybe through treatment centers, maybe through the court system, maybe through a whole lot of other ways, but they arrive at our doorstep by referral from third parties. What Sally talked about that seems to be really important in the future is learning how to cooperate with those people. Not affiliate, we're not trying to get into that stuff. Cooperation, professional community, the purpose of it is to tell people outside of the fellowship who we are, what we do and what we can't do.
[00:55:01]
That's it. And not say, please send us all of your poor, tired, beat up drunks. Just that if people, you know, you want to, we are. And that's it. But there is a tremendous amount of work in this area. And I know that probably a few areas in the country, and probably somebody will come up afterwards and tell me I'm wrong, that our area is doing everything in the cooperation and professional community area.
But from what I know on the West Coast, a few people are really doing this kind of work extensively. At this point, there are four guidelines and 11 pamphlets that are directed specifically to cooperating with these kinds of professional people, people who refer new members to us. In the future, probably that kind of figure will increase. I'm not going to write new pamphlets, but it seems like there will be a lot more to be written.
We, at this point, reach out to the military community, the senior citizens groups, the court systems, the medical profession, the legal profession. We reach out to several different kinds of alcoholism treatment and counseling professional sorts of people. We try to tell them who we are and what we do and what we don't do. One of the reasons that dealing with professionals in the future will be more critical is already becoming apparent now.
Last summer, I don't know if any of you read it, in the Newsweek magazine, someone said that it seems that alcoholism and membership in Alcoholics Anonymous is becoming chic. I know that that certainly doesn't go back to when Bill was crawling in the gutters or when I was crawling in the gutters. I didn't aspire to join this fellowship. I couldn't imagine that going into a dirty basement with a bunch of lunatics was where I wanted to be.
And yet, Newsweek magazine, which is a respected organ in our country, has said that alcoholism and membership in Alcoholics Anonymous is becoming chic, like Perrier. Perhaps because of Alcoholics Anonymous, Perrier is becoming chic. Working and cooperating with these people is a new form of 12-step work. First of all, there are two parts to it. One, the service activity that the committees would do to contact the professionals and say, we are available, and then to give orientations to the various professionals that this is what we do and what we don't do.
That's service work to the service committees that Sally talked about. In the future, there will probably be people who specialize in doctors and people who specialize in lawyers and people who specialize in osteopaths or herbalists or whatever else we're carrying the message to. In the last CPC bulletin that I read in Atlanta, I think, they're carrying the message to chiropractors and coordinating with chiropractors about referrals to Alcoholics Anonymous.
We'll probably in the future have referrals from everything from shop stewards to Buddhist priests, and all things in between. People who want to communicate with us about people who they have who need to find out what we do. In order to do that, not only do we need to educate these people and communicate with them at their level in a professional way, we also have to do the other thing, which would be to greet those people who they refer to us.
I think that this is an incredibly important area of 12-step work that is in some places— well, it certainly is not true in your home group, and it's not in mine, of course— but in some places, this idea of greeting the drunk who has been all shined up and processed out of an alcoholism treatment center and walks in quoting the 12-step tutorial traditions in a diet book, Additions in a Diet Book, that kind of greeting doesn't seem to be very important, that sort of welcoming them into Alcoholics Anonymous and helping them to learn almost in the same way basically I think really is what Bob was talking about, that, I mean, that, you know,
[01:00:05]
joining Alcoholics Anonymous, nobody has the answers, they just think they do, and that eventually they're going to have to learn how to stay sober by learning what the fellowship is, what these principles are, what we're up to, and that's Twelve Step work, whether the person is loaded with Peraldehyde or not, you know, that's Twelve Step work, whether we're, you know, we have those real squeezy wet drunks or not, we may not have that many, you know, sopping nasty rotten wet drunks with their eyeballs hanging out the way we used to, but there's a tremendous amount of Twelve Step work that will have to be done in the year 2001 because these professionals that we will cooperate with are going to flush those people into us. And perhaps, that word, I didn't even think about it before, but perhaps the idea of flushing is maybe what they're doing, I mean, we have, a lot of people don't want to deal with us. Anyway, see, I should never depart from my script. So there will be a vast number of jobs and many things to be done in the future and it will be related, I really truly believe, to cooperation with the professional community work. It's like an area that just hasn't even been touched. But I would like to do a little gizmos and gadgets thing before I sit down and stop because I think that, I mean, I've made my point about CPC. I think that it's true that we will have to become more aware of the needs of the professional in order to communicate with them, their need for time and our need to give them just the straight, clean message of what we are and what we aren't without the drama and the magic and the mystery, as Mary Defer from Arizona said, the magic and mystery of recovery.
Most professionals don't care about that. They just want to know what can you do and what do we do to get them to you. But besides learning how to do that kind of communication, I think that we can learn from professionals and it seems to me, I noticed that Dave Hall from Los Angeles was here on the last panel, many AA offices, intergroup district offices around the country are now turned to the use of computers in order to more efficiently process the information about our fellowship in that locality. And I would predict that in 2001 that most AA operations, district offices, intergroup offices, what have you, and area structures will have access and probably use rather actively some form of small computer and they'll use it for mailing lists, budgets, phone lists, at the area level they'll use it to gather archival material, coordinate group addresses and GSR names, they'll use a computer in order to come up with specialized lists for cooperation with the professional community context, they'll use computers to produce newsletters and print them and publish them, they'll use newsletters to project expenses so that when people have questions like, well why are we spending so much or do we have the money, well there'll be some kind of information that's available. And I remember that someone who's been sober for a long time after I gave the presentation and mentioned computers, he says, we don't need computers, you know, you don't have to have a computer to get sober. Well I think that's absolutely true. But we do have, those of you who have been to the general service office are aware, those of you who have been to a large intergroup office such as Los Angeles or New York or wherever are aware that there's a tremendous amount of information about Alcoholics Anonymous that has to be processed. And I think that most of that information will move towards computers. I think the other thing that will happen is that the basic tool of the alcoholic, quite often, not only just in the beginning, but on a daily basis for the alcoholic, is the telephone. And I would imagine that by the year 2001, the technology is already available.
We will have sophisticated phone systems in most intergroup district offices and perhaps even at the group level because their phones are now available that you can create your own conference calls and do things like that. And I think that this kind of phone activity will result in emergency 12-step calls where somebody calls in and really needs to talk to somebody and maybe needs to talk to a couple of people. And the purpose of the central office will be able to form a conference call and everybody will be able to talk together and do some kind of communication. I think that telephone meetings will become a thing of the future where people who are not able to leave their home, shut-ins or invalids
[01:05:03]
or sick people for whatever reason, will be able to conference through their intergroup or district office and at an appointed time with the central office doing some kind of coordination work. It's all very simple. The technology is already available. And they'll simply be able to have a meeting together. I think that many times as far as the professional people are concerned, one of their big concerns is having enough time because they charge by the hour to sit and talk with us about what AA is and isn't and to ask those questions that are necessary. And conferences on a telephone that would be set up by an intergroup or district office led by someone who is on the CPC committee with the various participants on lines scattered around the city or the county would be a way to professionally give them the information that they need, answer the questions that they had, and prepare for some kind of follow-up if that was necessary. I think that because we are the kind of people that we are, with telephone systems such as this, which almost anyone can have access to, they'll become regular AA meetings for telephone freaks. And I think that they, you know, there are already AA meetings for computer freaks and there is a way that people can get to a bulletin board on a computer and everyone can sit together and have a meeting. It's slow. It's certainly not as exciting as the ones that would happen on a telephone. Ultimately, though, the technology is moving towards availability. I think by 2001, we'll have video phones. And that will open up new areas of communication and some problems as far as the alcoholic. But probably on the video phone, there will be a way to turn the screen on or off if you choose to maintain your anonymity. Probably on the video phone, we will have probably one of the greatest advantages of that is the thing that Bob talked about, in that one of the important things that we're dealing with is me sharing with you, me a drunk sharing with you a drunk that eyeball-to-eyeball contact. And I believe that those of us who have managed to stay sober in the middle of the night over the telephone to our ear will be even more able to do so with somebody eyeball-to-eyeball to us right here. And that we will be people who will respond very well to that kind of technology. I think the problem about the video phone is that 3 o'clock in the morning phone call when you're trying to tell the person that, yes, I'm glad you called, and yes, I am wide awake. That will be a difficulty.
But other than that, I think in 2001 that the little lady who's in her 80s who has a little drinking problem and lives in a senior citizen's home will be able to call up her AA number that she never called before and say, I would like to talk to a lady of my age about my little problem with sharing. And the lady or gentleman at the answering service will say, would you wait for just a minute? And because she'll be on a video phone, she can monitor, the man on the answering side will be able to monitor the person and at the same time make another phone call after having first accessed their computer. And in accessing their computer, they'll be able to tap in information that will say, I'm looking for a woman in this geographical area of this particular age who is available during this time frame to talk with a person of similar sex. And the computer will be able to whip that out and while the man is putting that information in, he can go back and talk to the woman on the phone to hold her there until the information comes up and then put her back on hold, go to another outline, which would be part of the same system that he's using, call the woman in question who will be the 12-stepper, bring the two of them together in a link on a conference, bow out of it, and the 12-stepper will begin right there.
And all of that is technically possible in the very near future. All right. That was good. I got two of them. Okay. I believe that the major, for a little lightness here, I think that the major event of 2001, and I don't know, Bill must know about it already because he alluded to it several times. I think the major event of 2001 will probably be the first AA meeting in space. And probably two people will be rotating around up in some place and they'll be really aggravated, the other six people.
And one will say to the other, I'm really glad that I stopped drinking seven years ago. And the other guy will crack a big grin and say, well, I've been a friend of Bill Debbie for 13 years. And they'll sit down and have a meeting. I think that probably one of the best kept secrets that would happen in 2001 would be
[01:10:07]
that the man or woman president of the United States or the man or woman prime minister of Canada would be a member of the Fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. And that no one in the country would know except us. And we would know when the lady prime minister came on the television and said, and in response to this budget crisis, we are taking it one day at a time. Okay, very quickly. Well, I'm going pretty quickly anyway. I should be from New York, I talk so fast. I've had a lot of fun with this and that's, I hope, obvious to you. I hope that the future is not threatening to you any more than it is to me. I have the faith, based on a spiritual foundation that was rammed down my throat and kicked into my behind, that this program is in very good shape and will continue to be, that we do have challenges about growth and we have challenges about issues that we face today that will, I believe, be resolved in the future. As more information about alcoholism is disseminated, one of the things that I think is going to happen, and this has already been alluded to today, is that the calendar age of our membership will go down. I mean, just across the board, we will have younger members. You know, that our mean age will be lower. And I agree with Bob. I mean, I don't know that that makes any difference. It's just that it's going to be something that's going to happen. I think that there are so many programs at this point to catch the alcoholism earlier, that young men and women will move towards AA in great numbers because they'll be seeking our spiritual solution to their dreadful disease.
It'll no longer be possible to categorize AA as a group of middle-aged men and some few women who have solved their drinking problem, a categorization from a book about 10, 15 years ago. In the year 2001, teenage alcoholics of both sex will be with us in droves and every other age grouping will be equally represented. But we will, because of what's happening in the world as far as the awareness of alcoholism, I mean, we will see a phenomenal influx of young people.
All right. The last thing, the point that I want to raise has to do with, well, I'll just go through and read this. The pure drunk will be a rarity in 2001. The emphasis on recovery from alcoholism will remain the primary focus of the fellowship, however. Along with that, though perhaps surprisingly to some of you, I believe that one of the primary responses to the dramatic growth that I've indicated will be an increased emphasis on the basic spiritual principles of the program.
I know that many of our members are now concerned that there's a growing emphasis on the therapy group approach in many of our meetings across the country and on the increased discussion of drugs and other mind-altering substances. This emphasis is, of course, stimulated by the large number of us who came to the program through treatment centers and by the cultural acceptability of drugs in the 60s. Personally, I came to the program after treatment, after prison for drug dealing, and after skid row. So I know that it takes whatever it takes to get to Alcoholics Anonymous.
However, some of our members, perhaps some of you here today, sometimes me, some of our members are concerned about the rising trend towards sharing your feelings and exploring a wide range of topics at our AA tables, feeling that that's dangerous for the future of AA. In preparing for this subject, I ran across something that has made me believe that I don't think that that's true, that there is any danger in the future.
Bill Wilson in AA Comes of Age recalls the division that occurred and raged for two years after the first LA group was formed. That was in 1939 and 1940. Those who attended that first group, some wanted to stick with the spiritual recovery principles. Stick with the Spiritual Recovery Principles out of the book Alcoholics Anonymous. They were opposed by those who adhered to a strictly psychological approach based on the maxim, know yourself and be free.
[01:15:02]
This controversy raged in the L.A. group for, as I said, about two years. And during that period of time, the L.A. group wavered, didn't falter, but wavered. And then quickly recovered as the spiritual approach prevailed. And an AA custom was born out of that period of time that is still prevalent on the West Coast and I believe is prevalent in many parts of the country. They began to read Chapter 5 before all meetings.
I'm not really suggesting that whatever thoughts and controversy about these other discussions and the idea of feeling your feelings and that kind of thing will be resolved in some sort of clear-cut approach where we will move towards more spirituality and less discussion of the psychological factors of alcoholism. What I'm suggesting is that the spiritual principles of this program will play through regardless and that the program, as it goes through this evaluation period, will remain strong and viable.
Ultimately, as well, having looked at the past, there's an answer to one concern. I believe that in the year 2001, our answer for the largest problem that I pose today, which is the incredible growth and how do we respond to it, how do we meet all those people, how do we shake their hands and help them stay sober, that that answer for response can also be found in the past. I would like to, therefore, in closing, just share with you once again Sybil C.'s early story.
Sybil is from the West Coast as well. Sybil is now our oldest living AA woman member. She came to the Fellowship around the time of the Jack Anderson article and at the time that it broke and groups all over the country were swamped with cries for help and requests for information. According to her group meeting in California one night, having been sober for only a matter of days, she was handed a list of names and told to go 12-step these people.
Over her protest, the old-timers in the group, who had three and four years, told her with her very few days, just tell them about yourself, what happened, what it's like now, and you'll stay sober. I think that that's probably going to be what it's like in 2001 with the multitude of groups and a smaller base of old-timers because we've got so many newcomers. I believe that if we have faith in the principles of our program, if we refer to our past, if we avoid rigidity by seeking guidance through our group's conscience, and if we continue to freely give away what we have freely received, AA will be much larger, but very, very well in 2001.
Thank you.