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http://bit.ly/4Mh7wK Prescription narcotics cause more deaths than both heroin and cocaine Wednesday, December 23, 2009 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger (NaturalNews) On the heels of the sudden death of celebrity actress Brittany Murphy (http://www.naturalnews.com/027781_Brittany_Murphy_drugs.html ), people are once again raising the question of just how dangerous prescription drugs might really be. Some are arguing, however, that street drugs are the real danger, not prescription drugs. But the following study demonstrates why prescription drugs are far more dangerous than illegal recreational drugs. According to a new study conducted by physicians at St. Michael's Hospital and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) in Toronto, the number of deaths due to prescription opioid use has doubled between 1991 and 2004. Following the introduction of oxycodone into Toronto's drug formulary in 2000, there has been a 500% increase in deaths due to the drugs. Researchers reviewed over 7,000 files from the Office of the Chief Coroner in Ontario and found that between the years of 1991 and 2004, oxycodone prescriptions increased by more than 850 percent, representing about one-third of the opioid prescriptions given in 2006. (This is the largest prescription increase among all opioid drugs.) Following the addition of this drug into the provincial drug benefit plan in 2000, deaths from opioid usage rose by 41 percent. Shockingly, deaths from prescription opioids like oxycodone were far greater than deaths from heroin. The vast majority of people who died from opioids had visited their doctor and received a prescription for the drug within a month of their death. The total number of opioid-related deaths in Toronto in 2004 is estimated to be 27.2 per million people. Study authors said they hope to shed light on the tremendous dangers associated with prescription opioid drugs. Coked up on prescription smack It's the dirty little secret of the pharmaceutical industry: More people are killed by prescription opioids than all those killed by heroin and cocaine combined. And that probably even includes all the shootings of gang bangers in northern Mexico. Prescription drug abuse is now more common than street drug abuse -- by far! And yet Big Pharma rakes in huge profits from all the patient addictions to their opioids. And by "opioids", what I mean is narcotics. They are, in fact, one and the same. So of all the drug addicts in America today, you can divide them into two camps: 1) People addicted to street drugs. 2) People addicted to prescription drugs. The people in group #1 (street drugs) are taken to jail where they are given prison sentences. People in group #2 (prescription drugs) are taken to their doctor where they are given prescription refills. It's all really the same narcotics, it's just that one group is legal and the other is illegal. And what really determines whether a particular narcotic is legal or illegal? Whether or not Big Pharma profits from it. If Big Pharma makes money off the narcotics, they're considered legal. Big Pharma, you see, earns tens of billions of dollars each year from drug addicts. And just by coincidence, it turns out that their prescription narcotics are extremely addicting, guaranteeing repeat business. The business model is so dang lucrative, you might think they were drug dealers... Why do you think the main sponsors for the Partnership For A Drug-Free America are the drug companies themselves? It's because Big Pharma is trying to eliminate the competition. By keeping up the so-called "War on Drugs" front, the pharmaceutical industry can make sure it dominates the market for narcotics. After all, if you're going to feed narcotics to a nation full of junkies, why not make a hefty profit on it? That's the thinking of drug companies, it seems, as they have done basically zilch to effectively stem the abuse of their own prescription narcotics. Much like the tobacco companies, drug companies secretly want people to be addicted to their products. Sources for this story include: Deaths related to narcotic pain relievers have doubled since 1991: Study http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/smh-drt120109.php Deaths from opioid use have doubled, 5-fold increase in oxycodone deaths http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/cmaj-dfo120109.php About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health researcher and author with a passion for sharing empowering information to help improve personal and planetary health He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a manufacturer of mercury-free, energy-efficient LED lighting products that save electricity and help prevent global warming. He's also a successful software entrepreneur, having founded a well known email marketing software company whose technology currently powers the NaturalNews email newsletters. Adams volunteers his time to serve as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, and practices nature photography, Capoeira, Pilates and organic gardening. Known on the 'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org http://www.naturalnews.com/027794_narcotics_addiction.html +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Venceremos Unidos! Education for Liberation! Peter S. López, Jr. aka~Peta Email: peter.lopez51@yahoo.com http://twitter.com/Peta_de_Aztlan <>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>>+<>+<>
Key Recovery Links:
http://prorecovery.blogspot.com/
http://casa-12steps.blogspot.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CASA-12-Steps-Program/
<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>+<>>+<>+<> HumanE-Liberation-Party~http://help-matrix.ning.com/ c/s
http://recoveryinn.yuku.com/topic/2845/t/Re-Bill-Wilson-s-deathbed.html?page=-1
Bill Wilson's deathbed………
WashingtonPost.com
by: David Von Drehle
During her research for a biography of Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, author Susan Cheever dug through the just-opened archives at Stepping Stones, Wilson's longtime home outside New York City. Alongside an archivist, she sifted reams of material that had not been looked at in decades.
One day, the archivist handed her a sheaf of wide, green-lined pages -- hourly logs kept by the nurses who tended Wilson on his deathbed. Cheever glanced at them. They seemed mundane.
"Keep reading," the archivist urged her.
Cheever came to the pages covering Christmas 1970. On the eve of the holiday, Bill Wilson passed a fitful night. A lifelong smoker, he had been fighting emphysema for years, and now he was losing the battle. Nurse James Dannenberg was on duty in the last hour before dawn. At 6:10 a.m. on Christmas morning, according to Dannenberg's notes, the man who sobered up millions "asked for three shots of whiskey."
He was quite upset when he didn't get them, Cheever writes.
Wilson asked for booze again about a week later, on Jan. 2, 1971.
And on Jan. 8.
And on Jan. 14.
"My blood ran cold," Cheever said recently of the discovery. "I was shocked and horrified." With time to ponder, though, she found herself thinking, "Of course he wanted a drink. He was the one who talked about sobriety being 'a daily remission.' I realized that this was a story about the power of alcohol: that even Bill Wilson, the man who invented sobriety, who had 30-plus years sober, still wanted a drink."
In the Big Book, as AA's foundation text is known, Wilson recalled the time in 1934 when doctors concluded that he was a hopeless drunk and told his wife that there was no cure, apart from the asylum or the grave. "They did not need to tell me," he added. "I knew, and almost welcomed the idea."
On Jan. 24, 1971, the man known modestly to legions of alcoholics as "Bill W." was finally cured.
Powerless Over Alcohol
Cheever's discovery, reported in her book "My Name Is Bill," doesn't really change what little we know about alcoholism, a cruel, confounding and mysterious disease. It doesn't really change what we know about Wilson, a rough-hewn and unorthodox American saint sketched by Cheever in all his chain-smoking, womanizing, Ouija-board-reading, acid-tripping holiness.
But it might change, at least a bit, the way some of us think about miracles -- the shelf life of miracles, the limited warranty they carry, and how high-maintenance they are. Miracles come in Bill Wilson's story, but always with strings attached. They are a bequest -- but not like an annuity that pays out endlessly and effortlessly. More like an old mansion, precious and beautiful, but demanding endless, unglamorous upkeep.
The miracle of Wilson's sobriety -- and the birth of AA -- arrived like something out of the Old Testament. It was 1934, late in the year, when the doctors had given up on Bill. Booze, which once put its arm around his shoulder, now had its jaws around his throat. A smart, handsome, charming man, Wilson had become the kind of drunk who could set off one morning to play golf and awaken a day later outside his house, unsure how he got there, with his head bleeding mysteriously and his unused clubs still at his side. "The more he decided not to drink," Cheever writes, "the more irresistible drink seemed to become."
So for the third time, Wilson checked himself into a private hospital in New York that specialized in drying out "rum hounds," as he called himself. He knew what to expect: doses of barbiturates, assorted bitter herbs, castor oil and other purgatives, vomiting, tremors and depression. He also knew it probably would not work, that just about every hard case like him went back to drinking after being discharged.
The prospect was so dismal that Wilson picked up a few bottles of beer for the cab ride.
Wilson had a friend named Ebby Thatcher, another alcoholic, who had a friend named Roland Hazard, yet another drunk, who was wealthy enough to seek help from the eminent psychiatrist Carl Jung in Switzerland. When Jung realized how serious Hazard's drinking problem was, he told his patient that the only hope was a religious conversion -- in Jung's experience, nothing else worked. The American psychologist William James had arrived at a similar conclusion, declaring in "The Varieties of Religious Experience" that "the only cure for dipsomania is religiomania."
Well, by God, Hazard got religion and sobered up, for a while. He preached this approach to Thatcher, and Thatcher in turn proselytized Wilson.
"I was in favor of practically everything he had to say except one thing," Wilson later recalled of his conversations with Thatcher. "I was not in favor of God."
After a couple of days at Towns Hospital, Bill Wilson was past the d.t.'s and feeling really low. Science could do nothing for him. He now realized that he couldn't kick the booze by himself. Yet he was unable to believe in the only power experts knew of to save a drunk.
Then:
"Like a child crying out in the dark, I said, 'If there is a Father, if there is a God, will he show himself?' And the place lit up in a great glare, a wondrous white light. Then I began to have images, in the mind's eyes, so to speak, and one came in which I seemed to see myself standing on a mountain and a great clean wind was blowing, and this blowing at first went around and then it seemed to go through me. And then the ecstasy redoubled and I found myself exclaiming, 'I am a free man! So this is the God of the preachers!' And little by little the ecstasy subsided and I found myself in a new world of consciousness."
Wilson never had another drink.
Carry This Message
Brimming with vision and new consciousness, Wilson blew back into the familiar world as if everything had changed -- not just for him, but for all of creation. He bragged that he was going to save every drunk in the world. He went scavenging for men to preach to, finding them in missions and hospitals and jails and among his own drinking buddies. Some of his targets thought he sounded an awful lot like the Bible-brandishing temperance ladies he had rebelled against as a young man. He discovered that many alcoholics were "not in favor of God" -- God was an authority figure and drunks don't deal well with authority.
"This doesn't work," he despaired to his wife, Lois. She reminded him that he was keeping at least one drunk sober -- himself.
But within months, even that project was at risk. Having been blinded like Saul on the road to Damascus, he now had his sight back and -- as often happens to the miraculously enlightened -- was discovering little by little that he was much the same as before.
Tempted while on a business trip in Akron, Ohio, Wilson fought off the bottle by cold-calling churches from the hotel directory in search of a drunk to help. One call led him to an alcoholic surgeon named Bob Smith. Initially, Smith objected to being saved -- this was after one of those sad-but-hilarious tales that give a sort of rosy glow to a truly savage disease: Wilson's first scheduled encounter with Smith was called off after the doctor staggered home blotto carrying an enormous potted plant for no discernible reason. He deposited the non sequitur before his bewildered wife, then passed out.
The next day, when they finally met, Wilson answered Smith's reluctance by saying that he wasn't there for Smith, he was there for Bill Wilson. This was a key insight in the development of AA -- the realization that helping another drunk is key to staying sober oneself. It reflected Wilson's new humility about his wondrous white light and great clean wind. Before, he was trying to work miracles in the lives of others. Now, he was just trying to maintain the miracle in his own.
And it worked. After one relapse, Smith, who had been drinking even longer and harder than Wilson, got sober. Bill W. and Dr. Bob shared the story of their recoveries with more drunks in this same spirit. Some of those men and women got sober themselves, and reached out to still others. And so on, down through the years and out around the planet to the largely anonymous millions of today, who range from celebrities to legislators to schoolteachers to busboys, from a former first lady to the businessman striding down the sidewalk to the desperate soul working on a second sober sunrise. AA is now so widespread and well known that creators of the children's movie "Finding Nemo" could playfully include a 12-step meeting for fish-addicted sharks, confident that every parent in the global reach of Disney would get the joke.
It's impossible to know exactly how many people have tried AA, how many stayed sober, how many attend meetings and how often. The group is not only anonymous, it is non-hierarchical, nondenominational, non-centralized, nonpartisan. According to the Twelve Traditions that govern AA, there is no requirement for membership except a desire to stop drinking, and the group endorses no cause apart from that one. All it takes to convene an AA meeting is two alcoholics who feel like talking, and the tone of the meetings is as varied as the people who choose to attend. Group consensus rules in all things, so in any good-size city there are smoking meetings and nonsmoking meetings, meetings for early risers and for night owls, meetings mostly populated by long-timers and meetings more oriented to the newly sober.
The 12 Steps and decentralized structure have proved so effective and popular that other groups have copied the template for dealing with other problems: Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous and so forth. But AA has never branched out. Getting and staying sober has been labor enough.
Unlike many spiritual visionaries, Wilson came to understand "that when he heard the voice of God, it was often just the voice of Bill Wilson," as Cheever puts it. And so, in the now-famous catechism that he created, AA members are pledged simply to turn their will and lives over to "the care of God as we understood him," with italics right there in the Big Book. Prospective converts are often assured that they may take as their God the nearest radiator if that's what works for them. Almighty God with the white beard, or a gentle breeze in the treetops, or the sublime engineering of a molecule, or the vastness of space, or the love of friends, or the power of the AA meeting itself: Choose your own Infinite.
Whatever works.
In the can-do land of the bottom line, even our spirituality tends to be results-oriented.
But the language of AA plays provocatively with a simple word: "work." In one sense, sobriety is something that just happens, much like Wilson's great clean wind. It is a gift from the Higher Power to the alcoholic. At the same time, "work" means work, as in tangible, sometimes even grudging, effort. In the early days, Bill W. and Dr. Bob would sit in the Smith parlor refining their drunk-saving techniques, and often Smith's wife, Anne, read aloud from the Bible. They were partial to the Epistle of James, which reminded them that "faith without works is dead." AA members speak of "working the steps," and many meetings end with the affirmation that "it works if you work it."
This means returning again and again to the state of mind and the exercises that constitute the upkeep on each miracle of sobriety. Beginning with the admission that they are powerless over alcohol and continuing through labors of humility, repentance, meditation and service, AA members maintain the dam that holds back the obliterating tide of booze from their lives.
A Friend of Bill W.
Cheever is a forthright woman with a big laugh and no immediately obvious illusions, a hard-working writer who publishes books like clockwork, pens a column for Newsday and teaches at Bennington College. She decided to write about Wilson because "I loved him. I loved how he changed the world without knowing it, just as a way to stop drinking himself. I loved his Yankeeness," by which she seems to mean a range of qualities, from the Emersonian flinty optimism, to the unsentimental practicality, to the hovering dark clouds and the weirdo seances, which she calls his "table-tapping after dark."
No doubt she also loved Wilson for the fact that his miracle, worked and reworked through the long chain of drunks, touched her own family, late in the life of her father, the short-story artist John Cheever. Booze was the lubricant of Cheever's masterpieces. He was the poet laureate of postwar suburbia, in which hope, striving, lust and angst were all refracted through the bottom of a cocktail glass.
But what was symbol and atmosphere in his stories was toxic in John Cheever's life, as his daughter explained in her acclaimed memoirs "Home Before Dark," and booze washed into Susan Cheever's life as well. In her book "Note Found in a Bottle," she recalls learning to mix a martini by the age of 6, and doing plenty of drinking as an adult. Susan Cheever now speaks of her father's AA years as an amazing gift to the whole family, not a gift of bliss so much as a gift of simple reality. When a drunk enters the unreal world of his illness, he takes his family and friends with him.
Her homage to the family benefactor is pro-Wilson but not hagiographic. "I like to take saints and make them into people," she explains. She touches the spiritual bases in her portrait of Wilson, but seems more moved by the concrete elements. Over lunch at a Manhattan bistro, she recalls her first visit to Wilson's boyhood home in East Dorset, Vt., not far from the Bennington campus. Cheever noticed the low ceiling of the stairway leading to Wilson's room, and caught a glimpse in her mind's eyes, so to speak, of the gangly boy having to duck his head each time he passed.
"And I was him," for that moment, she says. "I understood what it was to be a depressed 10-year-old boy trapped in that house" after his parents had abandoned him to his remote and austere grandparents.
It's not easy making a spiritual figure compelling and real without slipping into iconoclasm. Cheever's approach is to apply a writerly version of Wilson's humility. She gets the goods on his serial adultery, for instance, but declines to make too much of it. "He was engaged to Lois when he was 18 -- hello!" Cheever says. "They were married 53 years. All we really know is that they were friends through an amazing life. He was a good-enough husband."
Likewise, she can look into Wilson's LSD experiment with proto-hippie Aldous Huxley without getting mired in a puritanical inquisition into whether this constituted a "slip" in his sobriety or hypocrisy in his creed.
This attitude allows Cheever to see that Wilson's inconsistencies and quirks weren't blemishes on his record -- they were the essence of a flawed man who was endlessly seeking what works. "Again and again, his intuitions were wrong," Cheever says. "But he wasn't interested in problems. He was interested in solutions." Most of the key traditions of AA operations, including its independence, anonymity and governance-by-consensus, ran counter to Wilson's personal disposition. "He wanted fame and fortune, but somehow was able to figure out that AA would have to be a group in which nobody represents it, nobody speaks for it and nobody's in charge of it."
Sobering Reality
The striking thing about Wilson's story -- which only settles in upon reflection -- is how hard his life was even after he sobered up.
What, really, had that bright light and clean wind changed? He and Lois remained penniless, even homeless, for years. Sometimes it seemed that AA was determined to keep him poor forever. He had a chance to cash in by allying his message with a particular hospital, but his fledgling flock forbade him to do it. He harbored hope that John D. Rockefeller Jr. would lavish money on him, but instead Rockefeller came through with a tiny stipend. Alcoholics Anonymous struggled for six long and underwhelming years before catching its crucial break: a glowing article in the Saturday Evening Post.
Then, as the group flourished, Wilson was attacked by jealous colleagues and abandoned by old friends. He sank into a crushing depression, and "often just sat for hours with his head on the desk or with his head in his hands," Cheever writes. "When he raised his head, he was sometimes weeping." Wilson liked children but was childless. Cigarettes were killing him but he couldn't stop smoking.
He wrote of "being swamped with guilt and self-loathing . . . often getting a misshapen and painful pleasure out of it."
It was enough to drive a man to drink.
Yet for 36-plus years of this troubled and very human life, he was able to resist that next drink. Perhaps the most efficacious miracles are the small ones. And because "his mind was the right lens" and his will was "the right machine," in Cheever's words, for mass-producing that limited but crucial victory, Bill Wilson's miracle keeps working, one person and one day at a time.
http://recoveryinn.yuku.com/topic/2845/t/Re-Bill-Wilson-s-deathbed.html?page=-1
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http://www.barefootsworld.net/aa12stepsorigin.html
A Fragment of History
by Bill W. ~ July 1953 A.A. Grapevine
AAs are always asking: "Where did the Twelve Steps come from?" In the last analysis, perhaps nobody knows. Yet some of the events which led to their formulation are as clear to me as though they took place yesterday.
So far as people were concerned, the main channels of inspiration for our Steps were three in number -- the Oxford Groups, Dr. William D. Silkworth of Towns Hospital and the famed psychologist, William James, called by some the father of modern psychology. The story of how these streams of influence were brought together and how they led to the writing of our Twelve Steps is exciting and in spots downright incredible.
Many of us will remember the Oxford Groups as a modern evangelical movement which flourished in the 1920's and early 30's, led by a one-time Lutheran minister, Dr. Frank Buchman. The Oxford Groups of that day threw heavy emphasis on personal work, one member with another. AA's Twelfth Step had its origin in that vital practice. The moral backbone of the "O.G." was absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love. They also practiced a type of confession, which they called "sharing"; the making of amends for harms done they called "restitution." They believed deeply in their "quiet time," a meditation practiced by groups and individuals alike, in which the guidance of God was sought for every detail of living, great or small.
These basic ideas were not new; they could have been found elsewhere. But the saving thing for us first alcoholics who contacted the Oxford Groupers was that they laid great stress on these particular principles. And fortunate for us was the fact that the Groupers took special pains not to interfere with one's personal religious views. Their society, like ours later on, saw the need to be strictly non-denominational.
In the late summer of 1934, my well-loved alcoholic friend and schoolmate "Ebbie" had fallen in with these good folks and had promptly sobered up. Being an alcoholic, and rather on the obstinate side, he hadn't been able to "buy" all the Oxford Group ideas and attitudes. Nevertheless, he was moved by their deep sincerity and felt mighty grateful for the fact that their ministrations had, for the time being, lifted his obsession to drink.
When he arrived in New York in the late fall of 1934, Ebbie thought at once of me. On a bleak November day he rang up. Soon he was looking at me across our kitchen table at 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn, New York. As I remember that conversation, he constantly used phrases like these: "I found I couldn't run my own life;" "I had to get honest with myself and somebody else;" "I had to make restitution for the damage I had done;" "I had to pray to God for guidance and strength, even though I wasn't sure there was any God;" "And after I'd tried hard to do these things I found that my craving for alcohol left." Then over and over Ebbie would say something like this: "Bill, it isn't a bit like being on the water wagon. You don't fight the desire to drink -- you get released from it. I never had such a feeling before."
Such was the sum of what Ebbie had extracted from his Oxford Group friends and had transmitted to me that day. While these simple ideas were not new, they certainly hit me like tons of brick. Today we understand just why that was . . . one alcoholic was talking to another as no one else can.
Two or three weeks later, December 11th to be exact, I staggered into the Charles B. Towns Hospital, that famous drying-out emporium on Central Park West, New York City. I'd been there before, so I knew and already loved the doctor in charge -- Dr. Silkworth. It was he who was soon to contribute a very great idea without which AA could never had succeeded. For years he had been proclaiming alcoholism an illness, an obsession of the mind coupled with an allergy of the body. By now I knew this meant me. I also understood what a fatal combination these twin ogres could be. Of course, I'd once hoped to be among the small percentage of victims who now and then escape their vengeance. But this outside hope was now gone. I was about to hit bottom. That verdict of science -- the obsession that condemned me to drink and the allergy that condemned me to die -- was about to do the trick. That's where the medical science, personified by this benign little doctor, began to fit it in. Held in the hands of one alcoholic talking to the next, this double-edged truth was a sledgehammer which could shatter the tough alcoholic's ego at depth and lay him wide open to the grace of God.
In my case it was of course Dr. Silkworth who swung the sledge while my friend Ebbie carried to me the spiritual principles and the grace which brought on my sudden spiritual awakening at the hospital three days later. [Dec. 14, 1934] I immediately knew that I was a free man. And with this astonishing experience came a feeling of wonderful certainty that great numbers of alcoholics might one day enjoy the priceless gift which had been bestowed upon me.
Third Influence
At this point a third stream of influence entered my life through the pages of William James' book, "Varieties of Religious Experience." Somebody had brought it to my hospital room. Following my sudden experience, Dr. Silkworth had taken great pains to convince me that I was not hallucinated. But William James did even more. Not only, he said, could spiritual experiences make people saner, they could transform men and women so that they could do, feel and believe what had hitherto been impossible to them. It mattered little whether these awakenings were sudden or gradual, their variety could be almost infinite. But the biggest payoff of that noted book was this: in most of the cases described, those who had been transformed were hopeless people. In some controlling area of their lives they had met absolute defeat. Well, that was me all right. In complete defeat, with no hope or faith whatever, I had made an appeal to a Higher Power. I had taken Step One of today's AA program -- "admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable." I'd also taken Step Three -- "made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to God as we understood him." Thus was I set free. It was just as simple, yet just as mysterious, as that.
These realizations were so exciting that I instantly joined up with the Oxford Groups. But to their consternation I insisted on devoting myself exclusively to drunks. This was disturbing to the O.G.'s on two counts. Firstly, they wanted to help save the whole world. Secondly, their luck with drunks had been poor. Just as I joined they had been working over a batch of alcoholics who had proved disappointing indeed. One of them, it was rumored, had flippantly cast his shoe through a valuable stained glass window of an Episcopal church across the alley from O.G. headquarters. Neither did they take kindly to my repeated declaration that it shouldn't take long to sober up all the drunks in the world. They rightly declared that my conceit was still immense.
Something Missing
After some six months of violent exertion with scores of alcoholics which I found at a nearby mission and Towns Hospital, it began to look like the Groupers were right. I hadn't sobered up anybody. In Brooklyn we always had a houseful of drinkers living with us, sometimes as many as five. My valiant wife, Lois, once arrived home from work to find three of them fairly tight. They were whaling each other with two-by-fours. Though events like these slowed me down somewhat, the persistent conviction that a way to sobriety could be found never seemed to leave me. There was, though, one bright spot. My sponsor, Ebbie, still clung precariously to his new-found sobriety.
What was the reason for all these fiascoes? If Ebbie and I could achieve sobriety, why couldn't all the rest find it too? Some of those we'd worked on certainly wanted to get well. We speculated day and night why nothing much had happened to them. Maybe they couldn't stand the spiritual pace of the Oxford Group's four absolutes of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. In fact some of the alcoholics declared that this was the trouble. The aggressive pressure upon them to get good overnight would make them fly high as geese for a few weeks and then flop dismally. They complained, too, about another form of coercion -- something the Oxford Groupers called "guidance for others." A "team" composed of non-alcoholic Groupers would sit down with an alcoholic and after a "quiet time" would come up with precise instructions as to how the alcoholic should run his own life. As grateful as we were to our O.G. friends, this was sometimes tough to take. It obviously had something to do with the wholesale skidding that went on.
But this wasn't the entire reason for failure. After months I saw the trouble was mainly in me. I had become very aggressive, very cocksure. I talked a lot about my sudden spiritual experience, as though it was something very special. I had been playing the double role of teacher and preacher. In my exhortations I'd forgotten all about the medical side of our malady, and that need for deflation at depth so emphasized by William James had been neglected. We weren't using that medical sledgehammer that Dr. Silkworth had so providentially given us.
Finally, one day, Dr. Silkworth took me back down to my right size. Said he, "Bill, why don't you quit talking so much about that bright light experience of yours, it sounds too crazy. Though I'm convinced that nothing but better morals will make alcoholics really well, I do think you have got the cart before the horse. The point is that alcoholics won't buy all this moral exhortation until they convince themselves that they must. If I were you I'd go after them on the medical basis first. While it has never done any good for me to tell them how fatal their malady is, it might be a very different story if you, a formerly hopeless alcoholic, gave them the bad news. Because of this identification you naturally have with alcoholics, you might be able to penetrate where I can't. Give them the medical business first, and give it to them hard. This might soften them up so they will accept the principles that will really get them well."
Then Came Akron
Shortly after this history-making conversation, I found myself in Akron, Ohio, on a business venture which promptly collapsed. Alone in the town, I was scared to death of getting drunk. I was no longer a teacher or a preacher, I was an alcoholic who knew that he needed another alcoholic as much as that one could possibly need me. Driven by that urge, I was soon face to face with Dr. Bob. It was at once evident that Dr. Bob knew more of the spiritual things than I did. He also had been in touch with the Oxford Groupers at Akron. But somehow he simply couldn't get sober. Following Dr. Silkworth's advice, I used the medical sledgehammer. I told him what alcoholism was and just how fatal it could be. Apparently this did something to Dr. Bob. On June 10, 1935, he sobered up, never to drink again. When, in 1939, Dr. Bob's story first appeared in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, he put one paragraph of it in italics. Speaking of me, he said: "Of far more importance was the fact that he was the first living human with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language."
The Missing Link
Dr. Silkworth had indeed supplied us the missing link without which the chain of principles now forged into our Twelve Steps could never have been complete. Then and there, the spark that was to become Alcoholics Anonymous had been struck.
During the next three years after Dr. Bob's recovery our growing groups at Akron, New York and Cleveland evolved the so-called word-of-mouth program of our pioneering time. As we commenced to form a society separate from the Oxford Group, we began to state our principles something like this:
1. We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol.
2. We got honest with ourselves.
3. We got honest with another person, in confidence.
4. We made amends for harms done others.
5. We worked with other alcoholics without demand for prestige or money.
6. We prayed to God to help us to do these things as best we could.
Though these principles were advocated according to the whim or liking of each of us, and though in Akron and Cleveland they still stuck by the O.G. absolutes of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, this was the gist of our message to incoming alcoholics up to 1939, when our present Twelve Steps were put to paper.
I well remember the evening on which the Twelve Steps was written. I was lying in bed quite dejected and suffering from one of my imaginary ulcer attacks. Four chapters of the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, had been roughed out and read in meetings at Akron and New York. We quickly found that everybody wanted to be an author. The hassles as to what should go into our new book were terrific. For example, some wanted a purely psychological book which would draw in alcoholics without scaring them. We could tell them about the "God business" afterwards. A few, led by our wonderful southern friend, Fitz M., wanted a fairly religious book infused with some of the dogma we had picked up from the churches and missions which had tried to help us. The louder the arguments, the more I felt in the middle. It appeared that I wasn't going to be the author at all. I was only going to be an umpire who would decide the contents of the book. This didn't mean, though, that there wasn't terrific enthusiasm for the undertaking. Every one of us was wildly excited at the possibility of getting our message before all those countless alcoholics who still didn't know.
Having arrived at Chapter Five, it seemed high time to state what our program really was. I remember running over in my mind the word-of-mouth phrases then in current use. Jotting these down, they added up to the six named above. Then came the idea that our program ought to be more accurately and clearly stated. Distant readers would have to have precise set of principles. Knowing the alcoholic's ability to rationalize, something airtight would have to be written. We couldn't let the reader wiggle out anywhere. Besides, a more complete statement would help in the chapters to come where we would need to show exactly how the recovery program ought to be worked.
12 Steps in 30 Minutes
At length I began to write on a cheap yellow tablet. I split the word-of-mouth program up into smaller pieces, meanwhile enlarging its scope considerably. Uninspired as I felt, I was surprised that in a short time, perhaps half an hour, I had set down certain principles which, on being counted, turned out to be twelve in number. And for some unaccountable reason, I had moved the idea of God into the Second Step, right up front. Besides, I had named God very liberally throughout the other steps. In one of the steps I had even suggested that the newcomer get down on his knees.
When this document was shown to our New York meeting the protests were many and loud. Our agnostic friends didn't go at all for the idea of kneeling. Others said we were talking altogether too much about God. And anyhow, why should there be twelve steps when we had done fine on six? Let's keep it simple, they said.
This sort of heated discussion went on for days and nights. But out of it all there came a ten-strike for Alcoholics Anonymous. Our agnostic contingent, speared by Hank P. and Jim B., finally convinced us that we must make it easier for people like themselves by using such terms as "a Higher Power" or "God as we understand Him!" Those expressions, as we so well know today, have proved lifesavers for many an alcoholic. They have enabled thousands of us to make a beginning where none could have been made had we left the steps just as I originally wrote them. Happily for us there were no other changes in the original draft and the number of steps stood at twelve. Little did we then guess that our Twelve Steps would soon be widely approved by clergymen of all denominations and even by our latter-day friends, the psychiatrists.
This little fragment of history ought to convince the most skeptical that nobody invented Alcoholics Anonymous.
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CASA 12-Steps Blog
http://casa-12steps.blogspot.com/
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http://casa-12steps.blogspot.com/2009/12/where-did-12-steps-come-from-by-bill-w.html
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c/s
~The Complete Serenity Prayer~
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as the pathway to peace. Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it. Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with Him forever in the next. Amen!”
~ By Reinhold Neibuhr ~ Websource: http://www.aahistory.com/prayer.html
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CASA 12-Steps Blog
http://casa-12steps.blogspot.com/
CASA-12-Steps-Program Group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CASA-12-Steps-Program/
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c/s
1. Rise with the sun to pray. Pray alone. Pray often. The Great Spirit will listen, if you only speak.
2. Be tolerant of those who are lost on their path. Ignorance, conceit, anger, jealousy and greed stem from a lost soul. Pray that they will find guidance.
3. Search for yourself, by yourself. Do not allow others to make your path for you. It is your road, and yours alone. Others may walk it with you, but no one can walk it for you.
4. Treat the guests in your home with much consideration. Serve them the best food, give them the best bed and treat them with respect and honor.
5. Do not take what is not yours whether from a person, a community, the wilderness or from a culture. It was not earned nor given. It is not yours.
6. Respect all things that are placed upon this earth - whether it be people or plant.
7. Honor other people's thoughts, wishes and words. Never interrupt another or mock or rudely mimic them. Allow each person the right to personal _expression.
8. Never speak of others in a bad way. The negative energy that you put out into the universe will multiply when it returns to you.
9. All persons make mistakes. And all mistakes can be forgiven.
10. Bad thoughts cause illness of the mind, body and spirit. Practice optimism.
11. Nature is not FOR us, it is a PART of us. They are part of your worldly family.
12. Children are the seeds of our future. Plant love in their hearts and water them with wisdom and life's lessons. When they are grown, give them space to grow.
13. Avoid hurting the hearts of others. The poison of your pain will return to you.
14. Be truthful at all times. Honesty is the test of ones will within this universe.
15. Keep yourself balanced. Your Mental self, Spiritual self, Emotional self, and Physical self - all need to be strong, pure and healthy. Work out the body to strengthen the mind. Grow rich in spirit to cure emotional ails.
16. Make conscious decisions as to who you will be and how you will react. Be responsible for your own actions.
17. Respect the privacy and personal space of others. Do not touch the personal property of others - especially sacred and religious objects. This is forbidden.
18. Be true to yourself first. You cannot nurture and help others if you cannot nurture and help yourself first.
19. Respect others religious beliefs. Do not force your belief on others.
20. Share your good fortune with others. Participate in charity.
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