Who Is An Addict? –> Excerpts from pgs 3-8 (Basic Text)

The following are excerpts from the NA Basic Text Chapter One: Who Is An Addict? Those of us who have found the Program of Narcotics Anonymous do not have to think twice about the question: Who is an addict? We know! The following is our experience. As addicts, we are people whose use of any mind-altering, mood-changing substance causes a problem in any area of life. Addiction is a disease that involves more than the use of drugs. Some of us believe that our disease was present long before the first time we used. Most of us did not consider ourselves addicted before coming to the Narcotics Anonymous Program. The information available to us came from misinformed people. As long as we could stop using for a while, we thought we were all right. We looked at the stopping, not the using. As our addiction progressed, we thought of stopping less and less. Only in desperation did we ask ourselves, “Could it be the drugs?” We did not choose to become addicts. We suffer from a disease that expresses itself in ways that are anti-social and that makes detection, diagnosis and treatment difficult. Our disease isolated us from people except when we were getting, using and finding ways and means to get more. Hos- tile, resentful, self-centered and self-seeking, we cut ourselves off from the outside world. Anything not completely familiar became alien and dangerous. Our world shrank and isolation became our life. We used in order to survive. It was the only way of life that we knew. Some of us used, misused and abused drugs and still did not consider ourselves addicts. Through all of this, we kept telling ourselves, “I can handle it.” Our misconceptions about the nature of addiction included visions of violence, street crime, dirty needles and jail. One aspect of our addiction was our inability to deal with life on life’s terms. We tried drugs and combinations of drugs to cope with a seemingly hostile world. We dreamed of finding a magic formula that would solve our ultimate problem—ourselves. The fact was that we could not use any mind-altering or mood-changing substance, including marijuana and alcohol, success- fully. Drugs ceased to make us feel good. Higher mental and emotional functions, such as conscience and the ability to love, were sharply affected by our use of drugs. Living skills were reduced to the animal level. Our spirit was broken. The capacity to feel human was lost. This seems extreme, but many of us have been in this state of mind. We were constantly searching for the answer—that person, place or thing that would make everything all right. We lacked the ability to cope with daily living. As our addiction progressed, many of us found ourselves in and out of institutions. We had regained good physical health many times, only to lose it by using again. Our track record shows that it is impossible for us to use successfully. No matter how well we may appear to be in control, using drugs always brings us to our knees. Many of us did not think that we had a problem with drugs until the drugs ran out. Even when others told us that we had a problem, we were convinced that we were right and the world was wrong. We used this belief to justify our self-destructive behavior. We developed a point of view that enabled us to pursue our addiction without concern for our own well-being or the well-being of others. We began to feel that the drugs were killing us long before we could ever admit it to anyone else. We noticed that if we tried to stop using, we couldn’t. We suspected that we had lost control over the drugs and had no power to stop.