ROOMS OF TRUST WHERE THE POLICE DON'T BELONG

UNDERCOVER police officer Maja Schlegel won an award for her work
infiltrating a Narcotics Anonymous group in Peterborough, but she's done
more damage than she knows.

Her role in the investigation of a mother in the unsolved slaying of her
21-month-old daughter was a dreadful misjudgment that undermines
fellowships forming the single biggest success in the battle against
addiction and may well cost lives.

Come May, it will be 67 years since a jittery New York businessman, only
months off alcohol but desperate to stay sober, stood in the Mayflower
Hotel in Akron, Ohio, contemplated the bar at one end of the lobby and
chose instead a different path.

Bill Wilson, convinced that the only hope for his sobriety was to find
another alcoholic to talk to, began making phone calls.

Presently, he was put in touch with Bob Smith, a besotted local doctor. And
the next day, Mother's Day, when the two men met, something that can fairly
be called miraculous began.

Smith, wickedly hung over and feeling as bad as ever he had, grudgingly
agreed to give the stranger 15 minutes. But upon meeting, they talked for
hours, privately and frankly. Immediately, there was a kindredness born of
having known the same hell of isolation, compulsion, self-loathing, despair.

In Wilson, Smith would later say, he'd finally met someone who plainly knew
from experience what alcoholism was _ and, moreover, who appeared to have
figured out a way to stay sober.

"He talked my language," Smith would say. "He knew all the answers and
certainly not because he had picked them up in his reading."

What Bill Wilson had apparently done was meld what he'd learned the hard
way about the physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual strands of
alcoholism into the first real understanding of the disease and to develop
the broad outlines of a program for recovery.

From that unlikeliest of encounters in that most ordinary of places, from
that frankness, intimacy and trust between strangers, Alcoholics Anonymous
was born.

Until then, the medical profession had regarded chronic alcoholics as
doomed. The damage they would do en route to the grave to marriages and
families was limitless. The economic cost of their car wrecks, their
swindles, their brawls and rampages, their inevitable physical and mental
deterioration was incalculable.

Since then, the fellowship Wilson and Smith founded has come to be regarded
as one of the 20th century's most significant developments.

There are now an estimated 2 million members of Alcoholics Anonymous around
the world, belonging to groups in more than 150 countries. And the 12 steps
that are at the core of the program have been usefully adapted by other
fellowships.

In church basements and meeting halls around the world, it works in the new
century as it did in the middle of the last. Anonymity is essential.

Most newcomers are terrified at first that anyone would know who they are,
much less what they've done.

One of the first things that usually needs to occur is for newcomers to
hear the stories of others, to know that someone else understands, to
identify with them, to acquire a germ of hope that what has worked for
others might work for them. Eventually, they will need also to confront and
clean up the wreckage of their own past, to shed the guilt, shame and
remorse that makes consciousness unbearable.

It is a process that can take years. It requires an honesty and openness
almost unknown in society at large. And in fellowships such as Narcotics
Anonymous, where members almost by definition have broken the law or
consorted with those who do, wariness is understandably magnified.

In the Peterborough case, the murder charge against Brenda Waudby in the
death of her daughter Jenna Mellor was thrown out of court. Waudby and
three others left the NA group. Counsellors say Schlegel's action damaged
the sense of trust and privacy that make their programs work.

Breaking down barriers of denial and. mistrust is one of the reasons
members tell their stories.

They know that no matter how far down the scale they have fallen, their
experience can benefit others. They know also that nothing so safeguards
their own sobriety as work with other alcoholics and addicts.

That's why members of their group often know more about them than their
doctors, clergymen, even their spouses. An intangible alchemy of frankness
and trust is at the heart of a program that has saved millions of lives and
billions of dollars.

Any person or agency that jeopardizes it does more harm to society than
just about any criminal they could name.