Narcotics Anonymous – Duncan Roy's Blog

The 12 Steps Erased No 1 RCA 24/25

I first walked into the rooms of NA/AA on October 1st 1997.

Narcotics Anonymous is a society of men and women for whom drugs have become a problem. That’s what they say. After a long while of going to meetings, finding my tribe in which ever country I found myself, connecting with others, working the 12 steps, taking others through the steps… what originally seemed so simple became very, very complicated.

I followed my ex lover Jamie into NA. We were cocaine fiends. We fucked on coke, we fought on coke, we were a nasty couple of fools who daily re-traumatised ourselves using cocaine. When he finally got help… I wanted help too. I followed Jamie into the recovery rooms of NA… and after a few months embraced hard core ‘sobriety’ in Alcoholics Anonymous. Graduating, that’s what AA people call sliding from NA into AA. It might be prudent to mention Jamie was not my partner but the side piece.

My partner Joe and me, we were drinkers but never took drugs. It just wasn’t our thing. We had boozy lunches and ended the day, almost every day, enjoying a bottle of Makers Mark. Our drinking, although heavy, was not unmanageable. I would describe myself as an overly affectionate and good natured drinker.

Joe and I lived between NYC, Whitstable, London and Fire Island Pines. Jamie badly wanted my huge gay life. He wanted me to fail Joe so he could take my place. Jamie couldn’t understand why Joe never batted an eyelid when things went badly wrong. When I came home covered in scars, when the expensive coffee table was broken because Jamie had fallen onto it, when the police came to the house looking for Jamie… Joe just continued to love me and support me without any judgement.

In an attempt to escape Jamie I fled to Sydney, Australia… Jamie followed me. He followed me where ever I could run. He turned up in Fire Island, he turned up in Whitstable. You know what? I was both terrified and delighted when he found me.

I had taken drugs occasionally during my life. Heroin with Freddy in Paris when I was a teenager. Ecstasy whilst clubbing in the 80’s, acid on one occasion. I hated weed… it made me paranoid but I loved mushrooms. Mushrooms made me roar with laughter. Mostly, I couldn’t be bothered with drugs because they were expensive, I didn’t know where to buy them and it was a struggle to know what you were buying. Jay J gave me my first ecstasy tablet on platform 2 of Whitstable Station. He just popped it into my mouth. It was fab.

Joe was hugely rich. With Joe’s money I could buy my own cocaine. We were throwing a party at our house on Adam and Eve Mews. Julian, a perfectly pleasant drug dealer turned up at the event and I bought my first bag of cocaine. For the next six months I used cocaine every day, fuelling the violent insanity I shared with Jamie.

After 6 months of constant cocaine use I could not leave the house. I only opened the door to let Jamie in to fuck or Julian to buy more cocaine.

That summer poor Joe fled to NYC and Fire Island. He called me to say Diana, Princess of Wales was dead. Jamie wet the bed. I consoled my self with more cocaine and tuba roses.

A month later, I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth, unemotionally observing bright red blood from my bleeding gums swirl down the drain. I heard a voice, a man’s voice quite clearly behind me, telling me if I didn’t stop what I was doing… I was going to die.

I called my friend Jenny, explained the deep trouble I was in. She told me I was an addict, suggested I get to a meeting. It was the first time anyone had the guts to call me what I am. The following day I stood up at my first meeting and identified as an addict.

I was delighted when I realised what I was! Addiction made sense of everything. Of course I behave this way, I’m an addict. Little did I know… cocaine and alcohol were mere symptoms of a far bigger problem. I wasn’t addicted to sex, drgs, alcohol, money… I am addicted to intensity. I am… an intensity addict.

Even after these years of ‘recovery’ I’m addicted to flirting, to danger, to trouble, driving fast, fearless debate, mercilessly rooting out the defects of others. I am addicted to holding up a mirror to those who think they are beautiful… revealing their putrid ugliness.

Even when the truth became evident and Jamie was finally booted out of my life for good… I did not seek an alternative remedy. I remained in the rooms of AA and NA and latterly SAA in hope that a god of my understanding would save me from myself.

I loved my new life in AA. I went every day… sometimes three times a day. I couldn’t live without the intensity of other alcoholics. It was easy to stop drinking and drugging because I am not an alcoholic or a drug addict. I am, as it turns out, addicted to sick people and AA/NA is jam packed with the sickest people I could ever have wished.

I had no business being in the rooms of AA/NA, no business ‘fixing’ desperate alcoholics who, after I understood how to work the steps, I considered my divine ‘calling’. I was not alone. There are plenty of recovering addicts and alcoholics in the rooms of AA/NA simply there for the personal glory of fixing others in recovery.

I left Joe two years into my relationship with AA/NA. When I stopped drinking he lost his best friend. I regret choosing AA over Joe but there you go. I stayed sober. I didn’t drink, I didn’t do drugs and stayed close to a group of familiar men and women who loved AA/NA as much as I thought I did.

I packaged my horrible mental illness into one word: addiction. And in NA they told me my insanity had only one cure: GOD.

Could I tell you honestly, after 28 years of AA/NA, if I was truly powerless over drugs and drinking? No. I cannot. I have been powerless over buying shit on Ebay, I have been powerless around cigarettes and a few men I thought I loved… but I can take or leave a pint or a shot or a line. What I wanted from AA/NA was, and this is difficult to admit… a connection in a lonely world. I was lonely. AA/NA gave me the intensity I needed.

Wherever I was in the world I sought out the rooms of AA/NA and made the people there my family and the many splendid rooms my home. I moved to LA not because of the film industry… because I was addicted to the AA/NA in Los Angeles. The rooms of AA in LA are the most intense in the world. Jammed with the sickest ego maniacs, violent crazy zionists and best of all desperate celebrities one after another playing out the worst of themselves in AA… flaying themselves before a willing audience, packaging and rebranding their mentally unstable behaviours as ‘addiction’.

I listened avidly to desperate men and women tell their stories of chronic loneliness, it was all I needed for an hour or so to pull myself out of my own self pity and feel better about myself. I would go to three meetings a day and introduce myself as an addict. I began circuit speaking to hundreds, loving the applause… telling my story, predicated on six months of cocaine use and a self diagnosis as the basis to inspire others. It never occurred to me… I am not a drug addict. I am selfish, I am self obsessed, I have a huge ego and a crushing self hatred. I have profound mental health issues but I am not a drug or alcohol addict.

How do I know? Am I protesting too much?

During the Covid pandemic, 5 years ago, I started drinking. Not heavily, I drank as and when I wanted to. I didn’t touch drugs. I have stayed drug free for nearly 30 years. But that doesn’t count in NA. Only the purest of abstinence matters to addicts and alcoholics. ‘Alcohol is a drug’ they drill into you. If you drink one sip of alcohol the flood gates of hell will open and you will die. I must have sternly warned a thousand or more addicts… drinking will kill you if you deviate from the strict (non rules) of AA.

One afternoon, with Ana Corbero in the deserted village of Carmona in southern Spain, I ordered a small glass of white wine and… I didn’t die. I was not beset by craving. ‘The phenomenon of craving’ AA people call it. I expected it. It didn’t happen. I drank one glass. That was it.

A few weeks after the first glass of wine I sat in my local Portuguese bar and drank another glass of wine, convivially with a friend. Again, there was no craving, no powerlessness, no unmanageability. I have continued to drink like this for 5 years. Yesterday, I had dinner with a friend, we ordered a glass of white wine each. He finished his then drank mine.

I still go to the occasional AA meeting. Why? Because leaving a cult is bloody hard. There’s something soothing about the language and locations of AA/NA meetings. Dingy church basements, chocolate biscuits, the mesmeric readings. But as with any cult it is impossible to pick and choose. You are either all in… or all out. There are no half measures.

I don’t feel comfortable around hard drugs or the people who use them. I don’t feel comfortable around pornography. Yet pornography has taken me faster toward powerlessness and unmanageability than any drink or drug. Love, or the intense feeling of love can also overwhelm me, causing me to go totally insane. Unfortunately I have fallen in ‘love’ and taken others down with me. Poor Jake.

Fixing others, it turns out, can also drive me into insanity and chaos. Making other people’s problems my responsibility. Fixing anyone who cares to take my ‘advice’. Not once did it occur to me… nobody wanted my advice, it was none of my business. My head was bruised and bloody from the brick wall I was banging against again and again. Innocently saying, ‘I can help with that…’ ‘would you like a hand?’ ‘I think it would be better if…’ I know someone…’

Who am I if I cant help? If I can help you… I have a reason to live, to be in your life. My relationships are historically built around ‘helping’. If your place is a mess I can clean it. If your marriage is failing I can talk you through it. If your child is sick… I know a great doctor. Like many children of alcoholics/rageaholics/addicts I am perpetually looking to repair the irreparable. None of my relationships are built on the level. They are all transactional. Swinging wildly from people pleasing to taking control… and all supposedly for the benefit of the person I am supposedly helping.

My constant desire to interfere in other people’s lives found a natural home in AA/NA. ‘Let me take you through the steps.’ The moment I understood what I had been doing compulsively for decades… I took action and changed tack. I went to Al-Anon.

Although people commonly turn to Al-Anon for help in stopping another’s drinking, the organisation recognises the friends and families of alcoholics are often traumatised and in need of emotional support and understanding. According to Lois W. the wife of Bill who founded AA:

After a while I began to wonder why I was not as happy as I ought to be, since the one thing I had been yearning for all my married life [Bill’s sobriety] had come to pass. Then one Sunday, Bill asked me if I was ready to go to a meeting with him. To my own astonishment as well as his, I burst forth with, “Damn your old meetings!” and threw a shoe as hard as I could.

And just like that, I’m in Al-Anon. I found my tribe. I let myself off the hook. I check myself whenever the desire to ‘help’ others overwhelms me, when I feel my ‘helping hand’ come on. Even so, I’m still a long way away from the peace of mind I craved for so many years in AA/NA but I see light at the end of the tunnel.

Al-Anon, is the antidote to all my fanciful ideas about my own alcoholism and addiction. In the rooms of AA/NA I competed to be the maddest mad man in mad land. In the rooms of Al-Anon I strive to be kind and gentle, to erase my desire to fix and control and make right. Al-Anon, where I can live by the tenets of AA/NA but need not live such a strident and frustrating life. A life governed by competitive abstinence. Where, despite being sold the opposite, I found a cruel and damning (god) higher power.

One of my closest friends is a real alcoholic. A bottle hiding, litre of vodka drinking, black out drunk. A real alcoholic. I am not and will never be like that. I know a real addict who will take a sip of beer and 3 hours later will end up in the gutter with a crack pipe. I am not him.

I am a responsible drinker and I haven’t touched drugs for 28 years. Drinking and drugging are not my problems today. My today problems are isolation, alienation and shame based anger.

Every day I seek to annul those problems. Every day I fail. But I am heading in the right direction. Heading toward death for sure… but eager to die with a smile on my face.

The 12 Steps Erase No 2. RCA 24/25

I am responsible. When anyone, anywhere, reaches out for help, I want the hand of A.A. always to be there. And for that: I am responsible.

Today is my sober birthday. My 18th year.

The non-sober people who warmly congratulate me on my sober birthday are unaware that within the benign cult of Alcoholics Anonymous abstinence, is not good enough. The first question many non alcoholics reasonably ask, “Why, after so many years, do you still go to meetings?” The truth is, sobriety as defined by William Griffith Wilson has become an absolute way of life: a total immersion, a divine calling, a cross onto which we nail ourselves and each other, a commitment to a God of our own invention that leads unquestioningly to a daily reprieve from the disease of alcoholism.

Last week, I traveled north to East Dorset, Vermont to the birth place and grave of Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was shown a plank, casually nailed to the wall, behind which Bill Wilson was born. The gentleman sitting beside me pointed at it, lowering his eyes, telling the story of Bill’s birth with the same reverential gravity christians afford the Nativity. The following day I sat at my lap top and wondered out loud to fellow gay alcoholics (on a gay sober Facebook page) how things have changed since Bill W and Dr Bob Silkworth framed the beginnings of what would become a world-wide phenomenon.

Much has changed in the rooms of AA since I got sober 18 years ago. AA has evolved. When I walked into my first meeting the message was clear. AA was a ‘bridge to normal living’, it was the nearest a person like me would get to being ‘born again’. It was suggested that I look for the similarities and not the difference when people qualified. It was suggested that I find a sponsor. A sponsor is a man or woman willing to take an AA new comer through the ubiquitous 12 steps.

Men sponsoring men and women sponsoring women to avoid romantic complications.

Sponsorship used to be a humble service, a helping hand, unraveling the mysteries of AA. A familiar face to show a newby around the rooms… as well as to go through the 12 steps. That first year I did whatever I was told to do. I made tea, cleaned up cigarette butts, I diligently read the Big Book. I was advised to find a sponsor who had what I wanted… all I wanted was peace of mind. I met Vince who took me swiftly through the steps. I remained willing and teachable. Vince was the perfect introduction to AA and to him I will always be grateful. It is because of the solid foundation Vince helped me build in early sobriety that I remain sober today.

Since then, sponsorship has become a monstrous beast riven with ego, co-dependence and self-aggrandizement. Sponsors congratulate themselves for the number of sponsees they have. Sponsors throw extravagant anniversary parties, positing their bloated and wholly personal ideas about sobriety, none of which has anything to do with Bill and Bob’s original intentions. Sponsors have become demi-gods, using and abusing their sponsees at will.

They say: Call me every day, don’t have sex for a year, we’ll do this my way… or the highway.

Originally the newcomer completed the first 8 steps in a day with someone who had already completed all 12 steps. Step 8 to step 12 would be worked a few weeks later. Today sponsors can take years to go through the steps, they might not have completed the 12 steps themselves. Too many sponsors make step work as hard a task as becoming a brain surgeon.

These sponsors use the book of AA against the newcomer, a hopeful… enthusiastic day counter (a day counter is someone who publicly announces how many days sober they are until 90 days have elapsed) may become disillusioned with the huge amount of written work he or she is required to do. These ghastly sponsors tell the newcomer that they have to be thorough, scrupulously honest, that half measures avail them nothing.

Step 1: the simple act of owning up and surrender is now a protracted treatise on powerlessness and unmanageability. Step 2: accepting God into my life as a power greater than myself requiring me to bow to anything other than my own will… has become a religious conversion. Step 3: the elegant proposal that ones life has been so poorly managed that it is best handed over to a higher power or… God. Step 4: (a moral inventory) designed originally to swiftly clear away the wreckage of ones past so one might better embrace God and sobriety has become a monster of self-examination, scrutiny and fear. A monster so fearful most will not get beyond step 4 to step 5.

This is not all. There are endless stories of Sponsors taking advantage of their sponsees sexually, taking their money, abusing their trust. In gay AA, because men are sponsoring men, romantic and sexual entanglements are rife.

The problem is: many gay men I meet in AA or NA are not alcoholics or addicts. They are lonely, friendless and stuck in a miserable half-life that the gays offer in lieu of community. They are drinking and taking drugs and hooking up. The gay dream. When they realize this is all there is… they turn to AA where they find friends, fellowship and community. A frat house of sober gays who never had a drinking problem in the first place.

When real alcoholics, desperate drug addicts wander into this clean white environment the gays simply don’t know what to do. They look askance at the homeless, the beggar and scarcely offer their manicured hands.

The gays have created a ghetto at the edge of AA where they get away with murder. Literally. Only last week I heard of another man who killed himself because he couldn’t connect or feel included by gay AA. If this gay sober cabal were working to keep the majority sober (happy joyous and free) then I would have no argument with gay AA but the facts are: many, many gay men leave AA after 5 years. This is evident from the ‘countdown’ where we celebrate anniversaries. After seven years there is a chasm, a ten-year gap… between those who stayed and those who left AA.

The enthusiasm (pink cloud) a new comer experiences during the first five years tails off into abject misery as they realize AA isn’t about making friends, fucking cute sober boys and going to sober circuit parties. It is about being present for ever. For ever and ever.

As with any small, incestuous group of men and women desperately holding onto cultish beliefs… anyone who challenges what and how they believe is destined to be ostracized. It happens in Gay AA, LA AA, Men’s Stag AA. Christ, I sat in a men’s stag AA meeting above a Palisades bank at 7am for nearly a decade. I witnessed and experienced bullying, homophobia, misogyny, ageism, racism… every day. Yet, somehow within the rooms of AA, this is perfectly acceptable. I returned recently to that room above the bank after having written about the ogres who live there. Those I had written in my blog looked disgusted… then conveniently reimagined AA in their own image.

A sniveling, grey haired, Dickensian lawyer called John told the group how ‘unsafe’ he felt that I was sitting in ‘his’ home group. Choosing to ignore the AA ‘suggestions’ and ‘traditions’ he personally attacks me. His greasy hair limp on his pink, mottled forehead, his uneven yellow teeth, his waxy hands trembling with fury.

Another pompous member of that same group, perhaps the vilest of them all, surrounded by the vapid newcomers he sponsors… momentarily forgets his ‘singleness of purpose’ and tangles himself in a crippling scribble of resentment and self pity. To the amusement and horror of the other alcoholics in the room he lambasts a recent widower who had foolishly delivered a favorable pitch about forgiving and forgetting. Warning (me obviously) that he holds onto resentments… then magnificently back tracks… realizing how pathetic he sounds to those recent converts to Alcoholics Anonymous he hopes to inspire.

Too many men have left that dank room above the bank and killed themselves.

Online, the gays reacted very badly to my mild critique, my gentle questioning. They told me I wasn’t sober… that I was ‘dry’, (dry is a pejorative term in AA meaning sober without working the 12 steps of AA) they tell me to go have a drink. They tell me to leave AA. More evidence of the sickness that exists not only in gay AA but also within our larger gay community.

I am not leaving AA any time soon. If I drink (as they suggest) I will return to AA a hero. If I don’t drink I will return to AA a hero. There’s very little they, my detractors, can do. When they tell me to drink they are really telling me to kill myself… and many will attest that is exactly what the weak-willed have done. Excluded by the cult of gay AA they have taken their own lives.

Each Alcoholics Anonymous group ought to be a spiritual entity having but one primary purpose — that of carrying its message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

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