Hugs Not Drugs

It started when Jimmy K and a few fellow addicts held the first meeting in LA in 1953. 50 years on, 30,000 weekly meetings in 106 countries prove the power of mutual support.

The Observer, July 2003

'I was a typical middle-class junkie,' a 38-year-old called John L says. 'Nice family, public school, good at presenting a mask to the world.' He started with cannabis and glue, and got into coke when he was 22. His job took him to clubs a lot, so scoring was easy.
As a child, John felt on the outside of things. At school he had a sense of low self-worth, a feeling that continued into his twenties. But he had a good job with some glamour and believed himself to be one of those people who functioned well on cocaine. 'The one thing an addict never wants is anyone getting between them and their drugs,' he explains. 'So if anyone would ever suggest that I was maybe using too much I'd blank them out and try not to see them. If any old friends cleaned up I would cut them from my life because I was terrified of them.'
He hung on to his job throughout the 80s. 'I was doing enough coke to make me feel extremely paranoid and go on some massive downs. I used to use all night, felt terrible waking up in the afternoon, think about suicide briefly or calling an ambulance, but then I had a can of lager and I'd start feeling a bit better and think: "Ah well, I'll just see if one of my dealers is in..."' John had heard that addiction was often talked of as an illness of insanity and a good definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes but expecting different results.
His life collapsed in his mid-thirties. He was fired from his job and felt he was going nowhere. The drugs had become the only constant. He attended a residential treatment centre, believing he'd be out in three weeks. It took three months. 'I came out probably just as gibbering as when I went in, but the great difference was that I knew I was an addict, and that if I wanted to stay clean I had to get to a meeting and not stop going to meetings.'
The meetings to which he refers are those of Narcotics Anonymous, an organisation 50 years old this month. Meetings occur each day throughout the world - there are about 500 a week in the UK. Occasionally, Naomi Campbell or a famous actor will turn up and be caught on camera, and NA will be in the news for a day or two - something it doesn't enjoy. As its name suggests, it prefers obscurity and doesn't promote its meeting in schools and church halls, nor its proven method of recovery from all forms of chemical addiction. It calls itself a fellowship and it is a unique and seemingly indestructible one. There is no leadership hierarchy, no restrictions on membership with regard to class, religion, age or sexual preferences, no membership fee and no political allegiance or direction. Accordingly, it is a place of great possibilities and it offers what no professional treatment regime or detox centre can - the principle of one addict helping another.

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