I have never used an illicit drug outside of Vietnam. I recall an old joke that the only way to tell the good Vietnamese from the bad Vietnamese was that the good ones sold dope. But when I got sober at 28, AA meetings in Sydney were dominated by old people and drinking stories, and I could identify more in what later became NA there where younger people, who were often trying to live as real adults for the first time and tended to talk more about their feelings and thought and about living in the present. Looking back, it seems that AA members talked about their drinking and those in the other fellowship tended to talk more about how screwed up they still were than about what they were doing about that. One of my favorite sayings is that we should carry the message and not the mess. AA was mostly about the mess of the past and the other about the mess of the present but there wasn't much talk in either about how to get out of the mess, which I see now as the real message of recovery. I still identify about as well in each and get about as much out of each. To me alcoholism and addiction are two words for the same thing and AA and NA, using the same Steps, are the same treatment for the same disease, but with a slightly different flavor.As the same flavor can get a bit dull, I am quite happy to get two meetings lists and go to both when I go somewhere, mixing my meetings depending on what I find. I realise that most members of both fellowships do not find this to be the case for them, and that is fine too. I recall a guy who came to a meeting I went to in Toronto that said, "Everyone is entitled to my opinion." so here it is. |