Chase the Rainbow

People come to Narcotics Anonymous in all kinds of states and often full of preconceptions – ‘It was wrapped up in my head with the Salvation Army,’ one addict tells the room to laughter, ‘I expected tambourines and God-botherers.’

I came into my first meeting three days clean after a quarter century of heavy drug and alcohol use, culminating in a ten-year relationship with heroin that began as a flirtation, became a love affair and ended in four years lost to an addiction that stripped me of everything I valued in and outside of myself, still dope-sick, clucking, cursing the cold that had fallen on the city the day I’d gone into withdrawal.

There were no tambourines. Smiles, yes. Hugs from strangers, yes. A commonality of experience that helped draw me out of the nightmare my life had become, yes.

Hope for those lost to hopelessness, definitely.

I struggle with aspects of the NA programme and probably always will. However, rather than reading like a tract, the philosophy of the ‘fellowship of NA’ sounds more like a political manifesto from the turn of the last century.

‘A non-profit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem’, NA is made up of ‘recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean’.

‘Anyone may join us, regardless of age, race, sexual identity, creed, religion, or lack of religion,’ it continues. ‘The newcomer is the most important person at any meeting, because we can only keep what we have by giving it away. We have learned from our group experience that those who keep coming to our meetings regularly stay clean.’

Meetings begin with a few simple readings steeped in an honesty most addicts feel they have lost from their lives forever: ‘Who is an addict? Most of us do not have to think twice about this question. We know! Our whole life and thinking was centred on drugs in one form or another – the getting and using and finding ways and means to get more. We lived to use and used to live. Very simply, an addict is a man or woman whose life is controlled by drugs. We are people in the grip of a continuing and progressive illness whose ends are always the same: jails, institutions, and death.’

This statement both resonates and rankles. I struggle to agree with the idea of my addiction as an ‘illness’. Is this the last of my pride? Or am I turning my back on an easy excuse?

Having professed the non-religious nature of NA, I’m going to ruin it with a biblical metaphor. Growing up in a devoutly Christian household, the passage in the New Testament that meant the most to me was Jesus, a man, alone and about to die, crying out on the Cross, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’

Drug addicts don’t live in Hell, that bustling metropolis of souls united in torment, but hang helpless on a lonely hill, facing a tomorrow over which they have lost control, of more lies, shame, betrayal; a tomorrow of abasing themselves once more before a God whose only currency is death, but which cannot be denied or abandoned without great suffering.

Drugs strip the addict of everything he or she values, both within and without.

NA addicts are reminded why they are in the rooms: ‘Before coming to the fellowship of NA, we could not manage our own lives. We could not live and enjoy life as other people do. We had to have something different and we thought we had found it in drugs. We placed their use ahead of the welfare of our families, our wives, husbands and our children. We had to have drugs at all costs. We did many people great harm, but most of all we harmed ourselves. Through our inability to accept personal responsibilities we were actually creating our own problems. We seemed to be incapable of facing life on its own terms.

‘Most of us realised that in our addiction we were slowly committing suicide, but addiction is such a cunning enemy of life that we had lost the power to do anything about it. Many of us ended up in jail, or sought help through medicine, religion and psychiatry. None of these methods was sufficient for us. Our disease always resurfaced or continued to progress until, in desperation, we sought help from each other in Narcotics Anonymous.’

Addicts lose their partners, children, jobs and homes, alienate the family and friends they steal from to support their habits, or push away as they become increasingly isolated. They disappear from social circles in an attempt to hide their problem, consumed by shame, embarrassed by their helplessness.

I was lucky in still having a roof over my head and a loving wife willing to support me through recovery, but most addicts come into the room having hit rock bottom. Early on, I heard the story of a man who had drifted into London from the North with a bag of crack cocaine and a wad of cash in his pocket.

He woke in a Euston cemetery with nothing and was soon living on the streets, begging to survive, hopelessly addicted to alcohol and drugs. He was visibly deteriorating, and a woman staffing the day centre where he sometimes showered and grabbed a cup of tea offered to get him into rehab – but there was a catch: he had to enter rehab clean.

It was January, and New Year’s resolutions meant detox centres were full to bursting, but having hit rock bottom he found a new determination and holed up with his sleeping bag (his only possession) out the back of the local Iceland.

‘I detoxed behind Iceland in the middle of the coldest winter of my life,’ he says. ‘And a couple of days in, the cops who usually moved me on were buying me pasties and bottles of water, and the manager and his staff were cheering me on – he’s gone three days! Four!’

He left behind the cold of January 1991 to enter rehab and has been clean since. Now that took guts. And heart. In rehab he joined NA, and over a decade later still attends meetings – not just for himself but to help other addicts. Remember: ‘We can only keep what we have by giving it away.’

By the end of my heroin addiction, intimacy was almost completely lost to me. I spoke to no one but the parasitic dealers who kept me in gear; I snuck into bed hours after my wife to lie rigid beside her, consumed by guilt and shame, cowering behind the tissue of lies that hid my addiction.

My friends were gone; everyone I knew I had made a stranger.

But in the rooms my fellow addicts offered smiles, hugs, laughter, profanity, understanding, acceptance, as much support – or space – as I needed, a text message, a sugary tea and a chocolate biscuit.

And I soaked that empathy up, a thirsty man in the desert stumbling into an oasis. I had been alone for so long, in my head and heart, isolated, lost, kneeling helpless before my addiction every morning.

In NA I found help I could grasp, made tangible in the story I share with the other addicts in the rooms and the love given freely by those who had once thought love was lost from their life to those who have lost their belief they deserve love.

NA meetings also begin ‘with a moment of silence, to think of all addicts still suffering, both in and outside of these rooms’.

So to all those addicts (especially those worried they’re going to be God-bothered into submission) still suffering in the cold, I can only say come inside.