Welcome to Narcotics Anonymous

What is our message? The message is that an addict, any addict, can stop using drugs, lose the desire to use, and find a new way to live. Our message is hope and the promise is freedom.

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“When new members come to meetings, our sole interest is in their desire for freedom from active addiction and how we can be of help.”

It Works: How and Why, “Third Tradition”

Is NA for me?

This is a question every potential member must answer for themselves. Here are some recommended resources that may be helpful:

Need help for family or a friend?

NA meetings are run by and for addicts. If you’re looking for help for a loved one, you can contact Narcotics Anonymous near you. 

Never before have so many clean addicts, of their own choice and in free society, been able to meet where they please, to maintain their recovery in complete creative freedom.

Basic Text, “We Do Recover”

Narcotics Anonymous sprang from the Alcoholics Anonymous Program of the late 1940s, with meetings first emerging in the Los Angeles area of California, USA, in the early Fifties. The NA program started as a small US movement that has grown into one of the world’s oldest and largest organizations of its type.

Today, Narcotics Anonymous is well established throughout much of the Americas, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Newly formed groups and NA communities are now scattered throughout the Indian subcontinent, Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Narcotics Anonymous books and information pamphlets are currently available in 49 languages.

Daily Meditations

Just for Today

October 27, 2024

Living in the present

Page 313

We want to look our past in the face, see it for what it really was, and release it so we can live today.

Basic Text, p. 29

For many of us, the past is like a bad dream. Our lives aren’t the same any more, but we still have fleeting, highly charged emotional memories of a really uncomfortable past. The guilt, fear, and anger that once dominated us may spill into our new life, complicating our efforts to change and grow.

The Twelve Steps are the formula that helps us learn to put the past in its place. Through the Fourth and Fifth Steps, we become aware that our old behavior didn’t work. We ask a Higher Power to relieve us of our shortcomings in the Sixth and Seventh Steps, and we begin to be relieved of the guilt and fear that plagued us for so many years. In the Eighth and Ninth Steps, by making amends, we demonstrate to others that our lives are changing. We are no longer controlled by the past. Once the past loses its control over us, we are free to find new ways to live, ways that reflect who we truly are.

Just for Today: I don’t have to be controlled by my past. I will live this new day as the new person I am becoming.

A Spiritual Principle a Day

October 27, 2024

Accepting All of Me

Page 310

We make peace with ourselves–with all we have gained, and lost, and learned, and become.

Living Clean, Chapter 1, “A Vision of Hope”

WHO AM I?

As cliched and psychobabbling as that question may seem, many of us will identify with having asked it–and having not known the answer. Or, more to the point, we didn’t want to know.

In active addiction, many of us could have answered the question like this: “Anyone you want me to be, baby.”

And right after getting clean, “Nobody!” might have been the most accurate response, considering the shame we were feeling and how invisible we wanted to be in meetings.

Denial had kept us from accepting the truth of our actions and their impact on ourselves and the people who love us. Many of us paid the price for this lack of self-awareness with the loss of relationships, careers, assets, even our freedom.

The recovery process allows us to start contemplating our true identities, and it takes all the honesty we can conjure up, along with a healthy dose of courage and humility. We learn to accept that we’ve caused pain and injury, have done damage to ourselves and others while on our destructive paths. We also learn to accept that we aren’t the sum total of those actions.

Recovery affords us the opportunity to use the hardships we’ve endured to help others. We divulge our deep personal struggles–those from our past and those that will inevitably arise while clean–in order to deepen our relationships with other addicts. In doing so, we show our fellow addicts that we can stay clean–no matter what.

———     ———     ———     ———     ———

Today I strive to accept who I am, what it took to get here, and where I am now. My past does not own me. Instead, I will use it as a tool to help others.

Do you need help with a drug problem?

“If you’re new to NA or planning to go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting for the first time, it might be nice to know a little bit about what happens in our meetings. The information here is meant to give you an understanding of what we do when we come together to share recovery…” 

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