BEATING the BEAST

Narcotics Anonymous Offers Ways To Put Addiction In Past

By 7:30 on a Thursday night, the Quincy District Court session room is
filled - not with court officers, defendants and lawyers, but dozens of
silent, solemn men and women gathered for a weekly Narcotics Anonymous
meeting. Up at the judge's bench, a stocky man in his early 30s named
Richie is earnestly telling his life story - how he watched his mother and
uncles shoot heroin when he was a boy in Lynn, how he started smoking crack
cocaine, became a drug runner and spent years in and out of jail and
treatment centers before he joined NA. "Your disease got you, man," he
says, his voice tight and urgent. "You want to get out, and you can't." A
handful of his listeners nod. They've all been there. For months, years or
decades, they have attended NA meetings with one aim: to avoid falling back
into the drug use that ruined their health, wrecked careers and marriages
and anguished their family and friends.

At a time heroin use in Massachusetts is rising and the state is spending
millions more for drug treatment, hundreds of South Shore residents are
going to meetings like Quincy's 'Just For Tuesday" group. From week to week
and town to town, weathered ex-junkies take a seat beside offenders still
on probation, young moms who have lost custody of their children and
sad-eyed men trying yet again to get clean. Most are male. Many have
overdosed at least once. They range in age from early 20s to late 60s, and
are laborers, salespeople, clerical and cleaning-service workers, and
professionals, "people from all walks of life," says Ray, a Quincy
financial services worker who is "20 years clean," as NA members term their
drug-free time.

Whatever their path to NA, they share an intense bond of old hurt and new
hope, and they cling to NA and its 12-step support program like a life
raft. 'Critical for recovery' Inspired by the older and better-known
Alcoholics Anonymous, NA has grown steadily since the first groups met in
California in the late 1940s. Millions of recovering addicts now attend
30,000 weekly meetings in more than 100 countries. The South Shore's first
group started in 1981 in Quincy and later moved to Pilgrim Congregational
Church in North Weymouth.

NA now has 200 weekly groups throughout eastern Massachusetts and Rhode
Island, with 30 in the south of Boston area, including several in Brockton
and Bridgewater. Quincy District Court has provided meeting space for 20
years. Low-budget and all-volunteer, NA is highly-regarded by private
counselors, state health officials and the state's district court probation
departments, which supervise 50,000 offenders every year.

"Support groups like NA are critical for recovery," said Dan Ryan, a
substance-abuse trainer for the State Commission of Probation. "Addicts are
all in denial, at least in the beginning, and the support groups won't let
them deny their problems. They hit them right between the eyes." State
officials say the extent of the drug problem - and the need for treatment
and recovery - is even greater than it appears. In the 2004 fiscal year,
Massachusetts paid for treatment for 102,226 alcohol and drug-abuse
patients, including 2,100 teenagers. Almost 60 percent were treated for
heroin and other drugs.

Michael Botticelli, director of substance abuse services at the Department
of Public Health, said those numbers do not include people who get private
treatment, or others who enter 12-step programs.

Under The Radar

A private program for a public problem, NA operates out of the spotlight.
Members devote their time and energy to getting the message to as many
addicts as they can, mainly through word of mouth or visits to hospitals,
jails and prisons. "We don't care where you're from. We just want to know
if you want help," said Dennis, a Weymouth resident who is 36 and is four
years clean. "You might still be using when you come to us, and that's OK.
It's the desire to stop using that's important." As they pledge to
surrender their addiction to the "higher power" that's a part of all
12-step programs, NA members also follow the tradition of identifying
themselves by first name only. They say this emphasizes their identity as
recovering addicts, and guarantees that meetings will always be a haven
where members can say anything they need to say. Those interviewed for this
story asked that their real first names not be used.

Nearly every NA meeting has at least one first-time visitor. Every
gathering is punctuated by the familiar greeting - "I'm John, and I'm an
addict" - and by testimonials from members like Bobby, who was released
from prison six months earlier.

"You're family," he told the Quincy group. "I'm grateful to you all. I'm
grateful to be clean one more day." Such accounts have been confirmed by a
clinical study published earlier this year that suggests that recovering
cocaine addicts are less likely to resume drug use if they're active with
their groups - working on the 12 steps, doing volunteer activities -
instead of simply showing up for meetings. One of the authors of that
study, Dr. Roger Weiss of McLean Hospital in Belmont, said 12-step groups
offer a range of practical and spiritual help - the sympathy and
encouragement of veteran members; simple guidelines for sobriety; and a
social structure that addicts can use to rebuild shattered lives. "Not
everyone likes it," said Weiss, who's director of McLean's alcohol and drug
abuse treatment program, "but for those who do, it makes recovery a lot
easier." "Nothing worked' Those who commit themselves to NA seldom go just
halfway. For the first few months or a year, they attend as many meetings
as they can reach. They plunge into "service," speaking to addicts in
hospitals and jails. Every new member is assigned a sponsor-adviser, who
has at least a year of clean time, and many forge lifelong friendships.

Ray, who is 54, started shooting heroin when he was 18. Over the following
16 years, he tried born-again Christianity, therapy, detox and methadone.
"Nothing worked," he said.

He drifted in and out of NA, and turned to the group for good in 1985. When
he checked out of long-term treatment and promptly sought a fresh fix, only
to discover that the old high wasn't there anymore.

"I'd had the experience of being 10 months clean, and now I knew there was
something better," he said.

He called his NA sponsor then and there. They went to four meetings that
day. Now one of the South Shore's best-known and respected members, Ray
been a sponsor for more than 30 other addicts.

Dennis, who works for a Boston-area chemical company, started drinking as a
teenager and graduated to cocaine. By the time he reached his early 20s, he
said, 'I'd done pretty much everything." It didn't take a court order for
him to seek a meeting, either. "I just decided to stop using, and the only
thing I hadn't tried was NA," he said. Heather, 21, a Braintree resident,
also took to NA from the start. Unlike many first-time visitors, "I loved
it," she said. "I had always felt like I was crazy and different, and when
I got to NA I realized I wasn't. Every time someone would speak, they were
speaking my story." Blonde and waif-like, Heather seems too young to have
lived the extremes she describes. A marijuana user at 13, she had tried
cocaine, Ecstasy and angel dust before her first overdose at 15. When her
parents kicked her out of their Newburyport home, she crashed at cheap
motels and crack houses, turning tricks as a prostitute to pay for her drugs.

She drifted to New York City, returned home and was kicked out of a
boarding school. She checked herself into detox and was living in a halfway
house on the Cape when that program's staff took her to an NA meeting. She
met her husband there. Ben, 33, left home as a teenager, too. Cocaine was
his worst addiction, and he spent years 'up and down," trying to stay clean
on his own.

'I'd get clean and I'd feel better," he said. 'Then I'd go back to using,
and I'd hit bottom again." He broke that cycle for good almost 10 years
ago. Now a construction worker, he has reconciled with his parents and
sister and is trying to coax his brother away from using.

While Heather goes to the Quincy meeting and a women's group in Hingham,
Ben is in a Monday night group at Pilgrim Congregational in North Weymouth.

'NA did that'

On a recent night, Ben joined 10 other men and three women around a long
table in the church's sparsely-furnished basement social hall. Three had
attended the Quincy meeting a few nights earlier.

Two were there for the first time - a young man ordered to NA as part of
his probation, and a 39-year-old Weymouth woman, who had been ordered to NA
in the past but said this time 'I'm here for me." "I've got to learn my
life all over again," she said. "I know it's possible, but I don't know
how." The young man admitted it was hard for him to be there, too, after
only two weeks of detox, "but I don't want to get high anymore," he said.
"I need to stay away from my old friends ... or it will come and find me."
He told them he'll be moving from the South Shore to New Bedford, where
he'd gotten a job away from those friends. That draws a handful of knowing
nods. It's his first step toward the second chance for which he and every
other NA addict prays and works their 12 steps to reach.

A few nights earlier in Quincy, guest speaker Richie had talked about how
his own prayers had been answered.

After years of crack addiction, jail and sleeping outdoors, he told the
courthouse group that he's still struggling every day, "still working on my
steps." But he has a good job now as a salesman for a Dorchester company.
He and his wife just celebrated their second anniversary, and they're
getting ready to close on their first house.

He paused. "NA did that, man," he said. "NA did that."

The 12 steps

1. We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives
had become unmanageable.

2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us
to sanity. 3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the
care of God as we understood Him.

4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. 5. We
admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature
of our wrongs.

6. We were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of
character. 7. We humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. We made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make
amends to them all.

9. We made direct amends to such people wherever possible except when to do
so would injure them or others.

10. We continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly
admitted it.

11. We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious
contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His
will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried
to carry this message to addicts, and to practice these principles in all
our affairs.