A Conversation for Sobriety

By Thomas J. Turner

About the Book

Thomas J. Turner has used his nearly half century of sobriety to discuss the positives and negatives of twelve step programs; specifically Alcoholics Anonymous and what he believes truly makes for a conversation for sobriety.

About the Author

The author has been sober for over 45 years and has helped countless others with addiction problems recover. He is a two tour Marine Corps Vietnam Veteran, was a criminal/bankruptcy attorney and is currently a Certified Recovery Specialist.

Thomas is the father of three wonderful children and grandfather to seven exceptional grandchildren.

Here is what a dear friend of his has to say about him. "I have known Tom for 43 years and have witnessed his sobriety and his passion for Alcoholics Anonymous. Tom is dedicated in his beliefs and in helping others overcome the bonds imposed by the disease of alcoholism and drug addiction. In his book he is giving his perspectives, developed over his lifetime and especially over the 45 years of his recovery.

A Vietnam Veteran, a successful attorney, a devoted father and grandfather and a staunch friend he has thoughtful experiences to share."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jul 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885278522

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Dedication

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This book is dedicated to all the women who loved, tried to fix,

complained about, criticized, improved and left me when appropriate,

and made me the man I am today.  

Starting with Mary K. Turner, the most amazing, intelligent,

loving, compassionate person I ever met,

who I had the honor of calling Mom.

I will be forever grateful.

QUOTATIONs

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I learned that the temporary or seeming good can often be

the deadly enemy of the permanent best.

When it comes to survival for A.A.,

nothing short of our best will be good enough.

(A.A. Comes of Age, 294)

In no circumstances should we feel that Alcoholics Anonymous

is the know-all and do-all of alcoholism.

(General Service Conference, 1965)

We believe there isn’t a fellowship on earth, which devotes more care to its individual members; surely there is none which more jealously guards the individual’s right to think, talk, and act as he wishes. No A.A. can compel another to do anything; nobody can be punished or expelled. Our 12 Steps to recovery are suggestions; the Twelve Traditions which guarantee A.A.’s unity contain not a single Don’t. They repeatedly say, We ought… but never You must!

(As Bill Sees It, 134)

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature, instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I’ve got held up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

MAN & SUPERMAN by George Bernard Shaw

What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know.

It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.

Attributed to Mark Twain

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

George Bernard Shaw

EPILOGUE

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I started this book with the end —the last few months of my drinking. I think I need to begin with the epilogue so that I can include what I learned in the three years of writing and editing the book. When I started, I really wasn’t clear about where I was going and how to get there. Many, if not most, people believe that the way to handle a problem is to gather more information so that you can then determine what to do to solve it. In other words, if we could just figure out what we don’t know, and figure out what we need to know, and apply it, we could put the problem behind us. That is what we have been doing in the recovery field for the past eighty-five years. I have come to believe that it is actually what we know that keeps the problem in place, and that to solve problems, we need to dismantle the structures that hold the problems in place. What we know is the structure that holds the problem in place.

From the plethora of books written and the amount of money spent on recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, it is clear that it is considered a problem in the world. Not only is it a problem, but it is a problem that is still searching for answers. Many consider alcohol and drug addiction a disease, but while there may progress in the treatment of other diseases, in the alcoholism and addiction field, things appear to be getting worse. Everyone inside and outside the recovery field agrees that addiction is a terrible problem that somebody or something has to do something about. It is clear that whatever is being done, is not working.

Here is an example that illustrates what I mean when I say it is what we know that holds a problem in place. In 1981, my separated wife, Lorraine, and I were not talking to each other. The few times we tried to talk, it devolved into bitter arguments. What I was sure of was this situation was not good for our three children.

Here’s what I knew. Lorraine was unreasonable. She had no idea how lucky she was. She was so stubborn that a reasonable conversation with her was not possible. On the other hand, I was a prince among men. I was going to many Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.) meetings, and I was listening to single mothers, and I heard what their main complaints were, and I decided to avoid doing things that most upset single mothers. I paid my child support on time. I took my three children every weekend because I knew she got up with them every day, got them dressed, made their lunch, and got them off to school before she went to work. At night she made them dinner, entertained them, and made sure they did their homework. It was clear to me that, between work and taking care of three children ages eleven, nine, and seven, she didn’t have much time for herself. I found out what time she wanted them picked up (10:00 AM, Saturday) and dropped off (6:00 P.M., Sunday) and I was always on time. I also told her if there ever was a time she needed me to take the children during weekdays, I would.

See? I was a prince among men, and she had no idea how lucky she was. What I knew about her and me left me with a dilemma. I, the reasonable one, wanted to work things out. She, the stubborn, unreasonable one, wouldn’t even talk to me. You may ask, how did I know all this? My internal monologue told me so. You know that little voice that is going from the moment you wake up (just five more minutes) until you go to sleep ("shit, I have to get up at six). Sometimes when you’re stressed it wakes you up at 3:00 AM and refuses to shut up, so you can’t get back to sleep.

So, what I knew had me in a conundrum from which there was no escape. I was sure that we could not resolve our problem without communicating, and she refused to even talk to me. I tried a different track. I called her and said I wanted to talk to her, but this time she would talk, and I would only listen. I wanted her to let me know her experience of our relationship over the past five or six years. I would pick her up and give her a ride home. She would talk and I would listen. I picked her up and as she started talking. I noticed that I was primarily listening to what my internal monologue had to say about what she was saying. So, I relegated my internal monologue to the background and concentrated on what she was saying. After a few minutes it became very clear to me that I had no idea who Lorraine was and that I didn’t know anything about her.

She told me about a young woman who married a guy and had three children by him. She helped him get through college and law school. She worked when she could and took care of me and the children when she was unable to work. Suddenly, I started coming home after 2:00 AM, if I came home at all. I stopped paying the bills and helping at home. One day, I disappeared for two or three days, and when I came home, all my possessions were packed up in green trash bags on our front porch. She gave me an ultimatum. Change or leave. I left, and as I was walking away, she asked me, What went wrong? and I flippantly answered, I guess I never loved you as much as I loved myself.

After I left, I stopped supporting her and the children. She found out I had taken out a second mortgage on the house and not paid either mortgage for a while, and the house was being foreclosed on and was in danger of being sold at a Sheriff Sale. My and her family helped stop the foreclosure. She was now dependent on the charity of others. She had to go on welfare to survive as she wasn’t getting a cent from me. She no longer had a car as I had borrowed it to run away from Philadelphia and never returned it because I sold it for money to get back home. She marshalled her resources, got a job, and took on the responsibility of nurturing and supporting three children six, four, and two years old. I was nowhere to be found. I was working as a bartender in Center City and none of the money I made went to her or the children.

To be fair to myself, on Christmas 1976, I did buy the children a gerbil. In April 1977, I went into treatment. She supported me in any way she could. She took my mother and children to my rehab, when asked, to support me in my treatment. I was in treatment until mid-September and then returned home.

I then showed up back in her life. A super recovering alcoholic with his twelve steps and his new spiritual way of life. Telling her if she followed my directions, she could now have a life worth living. I asked her to take me back. She broke up with her current fiancée, and I moved back home. After a month or so it occurred to me that she was trying to change me, and I couldn’t have that. So, I left.

Of course, I now had a job and was helping to take care of her and the children, as I outlined above. People were telling her, Isn’t it wonderful about Tom? The kids would come home after I took them somewhere I could afford and she couldn’t and they would say excitedly, Mommy, Mommy, guess where daddy took us. This being the same person who deserted her twice and made her life hell on earth for a significant period of time. And in all that time, what she did is take care of and make the world safe for what I loved the most while I was unable to. Not because of an accident, but due to my own shameful conduct. In all that time, she never once bad mouthed me to my children, because she wanted them to be proud of their father. It became abundantly clear to me that I had no idea who Lorraine was and all the things I knew about her were wrong.

Our relationship since that day has been based on our commitment to the wellbeing of our children and later our grandchildren. Not based on our opinions or feelings about each other. This could not have occurred if I hadn’t seen that everything I knew about Lorraine was mistaken. What held the conundrum in place is what I knew about her!

Somewhere around 50,000 to 2 million years ago, human beings developed language. How that happened no one knows for sure. There are many theories about how that occurred, and everyone in the linguistic field agrees that we will never know for sure. Somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago, some human being started fooling around with a piece of fruit, some grain, a potato, or honey. Then fermentation somehow occurred, and the result was consumed, and someone said WOW!!! It was shared with another human being and later, after the first hangover, a conversation about the relative merits of alcohol started, and it continues until right now.

One thing we know for sure is, alcohol isn’t going away. The other thing we know is that conversations about its relative merits are not going away. Therefore, if we want to make a difference, we have to change the conversations swirling around its use and abuse. It is my contention that many of the beliefs and opinions about what works or doesn’t work in recovery came out of conversations that started 4,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Structures that hold problems in place are always linguist distinctions. Opinions, beliefs, and points of view are never physical structures; they are always linguistic in nature. The advantage of this is you don’t need hammers and crow bars to dismantle them. All you need to do is change the conversation. An example of this is that in 1937, the prevailing belief (conversation) held by laymen and experts was that alcoholics never fully recovered. They would always relapse, and the best you could hope for was periods of sobriety, followed by the inevitable bust outs. All you could do is mitigate the damage the alcoholic would do. If you said that today, no one would agree with you. Just about everyone knows a fully recovered alcoholic. My family alone has me, my brother, Michael (both forty-five years), my brother, Joe (forty years), my uncle, Dan (died with over thirty years), and his son, Danny, with over thirty years. Bill Wilson (the founder of A.A.) changed the conversation from alcoholics can’t get sober to they certainly can. This book examines the beliefs, opinions, points of view, stories, and mythologies that get in the way of recovery, as well as the ones that actually make a difference.

THE END

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March 1, 1977–April 19, 1977

Sometime, around March 1977, I went on a particularly bad load. A run that had caused me quite a bit of humiliation. Much of it is still foggy. Though I do remember a nice young lady I took out on a few dates, but the relationship was short lived. She had told me, while I was fun to be around…I was just too much to deal with: like showing up at her apartment at 3:00 AM roaring drunk, with a black eye, clothes ripped, and a gaping bite mark on my back (somehow despite the fact I was wearing a sweater and a shirt under it); or for threatening some poor schmuck because I thought he looked at her the wrong way; or for just being a loud and abrasive asshole in general. For these reasons, and many I’m sure I can’t recall, she requested I stay out of her life. Fair enough. I also had no job, was being evicted, getting into fistfights weekly, and had deserted my wife and children. I decided that, perhaps, it might be a good idea if I stopped drinking…at least for a little while. I would usually quit drinking the first two weeks of March anyway. Mostly to cleanse my system and prep it for St. Patrick’s Day. This time around, I would just stop drinking for a little bit longer. I never had difficulty doing so in previous years. Why would this year be any different? But it was.

As it turned out, when I didn’t drink, I showed symptoms most people experienced when they did. I felt disoriented. I lost my equilibrium and staggered when I walked, often stopping to use parking meters as walking sticks just to make it down the street. I was anxiety filled and had difficulty sleeping through the night. My face burned. I was flushed. I experienced pains in my chest, had trouble breathing, and was convinced I was having a heart attack. I was so scared at one point, I checked myself into the emergency room at Jefferson Hospital. The young interns who examined me said my blood pressure was hovering around 220/190, but my heart seemed to be in pretty good shape. In other words, I was not having a heart attack.

They questioned me further and asked how much I had been drinking. As someone who never saw any virtue in lying about this (except maybe to exaggerate how much), I told them I consumed about one-to-three fifths of cheap vodka (and sundry other alcoholic substances) a day, depending on how much money I had at the time. This shed some light, and they told me I was most likely suffering withdrawal effects from chronic alcoholism (it had been about thirty-six hours since my last drink) and that I needed to be admitted for detoxification. Unfortunately, it was a Friday, and I couldn’t be admitted before the weekend. So, they gave me a prescription for Librium and instructed me to return the following week. I filled that prescription, popped a few pills, and my symptoms disappeared. Suffice to say, I decided not to return.

Besides, they were probably being alarmists. Just because I was a 33-year-old attorney who quit law to be a bartender/bouncer, lost that job, was being evicted, had deserted my family fourteen months earlier, hadn’t supported my three children since that time, and was getting into two or three fistfights a week, didn’t mean I had a problem with alcohol. Christ, if you saw the world as I did, and had the problems I had, you’d drink one to three fifths of vodka daily, too. I mean, I wasn’t that bad. Right?

Though Billy T., manager of the Sansom House bar, and one of the few friends I had left, might have disagreed. He told me on the night he (regrettably) fired me as his bartender, Tom, if you croaked, I had you stuffed and I put a drink in your one hand and stuck the other in my cash register, nobody would even notice that you were dead. That wasn’t original by the way; it’s what the owner of Doctor Watson’s Pub told Billy when he got fired as a bartender a few years before.

It was true I had no job. It was also true I could not muster the energy to pick up my welfare checks and food stamps at the bank even though it was less than a mile away. I had a few months before my eviction was final but was sure something would come along to rescue me before that occurred. My roommate and best friend, Dick F., had just received a settlement from an auto accident and put a down payment on a breakfast and lunch counter in Ocean City, New Jersey. So, I only needed to hold out for three months before the beginning of the summer season. The fact Dick and I were constantly drunk and didn’t know how to boil water, let alone run a restaurant, didn’t seem to bother either of us in the least. Nor did not owning a car or having a way to get to Ocean City. Dick and I knew it would all work out.

Flash forward six weeks later to the morning of April 19, 1977. I woke up with my hands shaking. I had trouble sleeping the night before and hadn’t taken a drink in about twenty-four hours. I remember feeling lightheaded and would describe my mood that morning as testy at best. I went with Dick, who was also a Philadelphia police lieutenant, to Hemingway’s II, a seedy cop bar on 11th and Chestnut Streets in Center City Philadelphia, where he met with Ray K., who everybody suspected was a hit man. They were morning drinking, which wasn’t unusual, but I was not…which was. After a few drinks, someone needed to hit the bank to make a deposit. I don’t remember whom, but it couldn’t have been me as I was broke and had been for some time.

We left Hemingway’s and headed over to the bank on 11th and Market Streets. On our way back, we passed Philadelphia Community College, which had a driveway that connected 10th and 11th Streets. We happened upon about a dozen or so young black guys celebrating something. I’m not sure what, doesn’t matter, but one of them was sitting in his car blowing the horn. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been on the verge of a brain convulsion while someone was laying on a car horn before, but if you haven’t, I’ll tell you right now, it feels like someone is hitting your head with a tack hammer. And if your mood already happens to be testy, it hits homicidal pretty quick. I pushed my way through the group, grabbed the young man in the driver’s seat by his wrist, and said, Stop blowing the horn, n….r!

For some reason he took umbrage at this. He reached down next to his seat, pulled out a car antenna, and began hitting me with it. I took umbrage with that, yanked the antenna from his grip, and commenced to beat him with it. His friends took umbrage with that and rained down a beating on me, and so it went. Somehow, I managed to break free with no more than a bloodied mouth and a few bruises. I found myself in the arms of Dick and Ray, who were dragging me away in an attempt to stop me from attacking twelve, now very angry, young men. Dick, who was at the time fighting his own losing battle with alcohol, wrapped his arm around my neck, pulled me in, and whispered in my ear, Turner, you have gone beyond the bounds of alcoholic conduct.

Having decided I was a danger to myself and to others, and knowing I was a Vietnam vet, they escorted me to the Veterans Hospital on 36th and Woodlawn in order to have me admitted. I should mention, since they had been doing some morning drinking, they were both already a little drunk. So, two drunks took me, who was testy but sober and a little bloody, to a hospital to be committed. After taking stock of the situation, the hospital’s powers that be, whoever they were, decided not to admit me as an alcoholic for detoxification, seeing as I, the potential patient, was stone cold sober and those who wanted me admitted were not. I was then informed that, if I wanted to, I could go through channels and get an appointment for a psychological evaluation, at which point the two drunks began to berate the staff because they were about to let a deranged homicidal maniac loose on the city. I was too confused and testy to give a fuck. So, they kicked us all out. (Is that any way to treat a Vietnam vet? But that’s a whole other story.)

Now, Dick had been in A.A. a few years before we met, and at one point, probably around 1974/75, even had over a year sober. His sergeant, Mike R., was his sponsor, and every time Dick threatened to bust out (drink again), Mike instructed him to say to himself, I’m not going to drink until I can buy a Coors in Philadelphia. At that time, Coors was not sold in Pennsylvania. Well, as luck would have it, one day, as Dick was driving his command car through the city, nursing one of his many and varied resentments, or perhaps annoyed at one of his many and varied girlfriends, he drove past a bar on 11th Street and noticed it had a sign in the window that read, Coors today in Philadelphia! Bye-bye a year of sobriety.

When Dick would put on a particularly big load, he would often pass out at the bar or go on a violent rampage, and Mike would scoop him up and deposit him in the detox at the Valley Forge Medical Center. Dick would wake up the next morning with no idea where he was or how he got there, and once he got his bearings, would promptly check himself out against medical advice. Since the VA had just kicked me to the curb, Dick decided to try his ex-A.A. sponsor’s strategy out on me, though hopefully with better results. So, he called the Valley Forge Medical Center and asked if they took welfare cards (remember, I’m an ex-lawyer on welfare at this time). Luckily, they did, and Dick and Ray decided that was our next stop, but hoping to avoid a repeat of the VA fiasco, they wanted to make sure I was fully intoxicated upon arrival.

So, we left the VA and headed to Dirty Franks, a bohemian dive at 13th and Pine Streets. I’m not saying Dirty Franks is dirty, but there are city dumps that are probably more sanitary. As an aside, I really liked Dirty Franks, even though I preferred the Pine Street Beverage Room just across the street. Dirty Franks was the kind of joint where if you left a girl at the bar to go to the bathroom, when you got back there would be a gay woman on one side of her and a black guy on the other trying to cut your grass. In other words, a great place to get into a fight.

We arrived at Dirty Franks around 1:00 P.M. and proceeded to get drunk (me) and drunker (them). To help me reach the proper level of intoxication, Dick and Ray would dump an extra shot into whatever I was drinking whenever I got up to use the bathroom (they told me this later). I vaguely remember watching the Flyers game (it was April, so they must have been in the playoffs — Go Flyers!). About seven or eight hours later, at 8:00 or 9:00 P.M., Dick and Ray had determined I was drunk enough, and it was time to get me to the medical center in Valley Forge.

At the time, Dirty Franks had (and still had up until about six years ago, I think) a pay phone by the front (and only) door. It was on the wall to your right as you exited the establishment. As we were leaving, there was someone using the phone. Seeing as his head was not too far from my right hand, I decked him on the way out. Dick and Ray asked me, Why the hell did you do that? I answered, He looked at me.

As we stumbled west on Pine Street to find the car, some poor soul carrying two grocery bags approached us from the other direction. And as he passed alongside us, I decked him too. Again, they asked, Why the hell did you do that? I replied, He didn’t look at me. Like I said earlier. I was an asshole.

We drove out toward Norristown, where the detox was located. I passed out in the car and woke up in a bar near the Fort Washington exit off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Evidently, the car had broken down, but we made it into the bar. Not to be deterred by this inconvenience, Dick recruited some other drunk, who we didn’t know from Adam, to help complete this mission of mercy. A mission he confided to me somewhere along the way that he was doing not so that I would stop drinking for good…but rather so that I could learn to drink sensibly like him.

Next thing I remember, I was being escorted into the detox ward at the hospital. The station nurse looked us up and down, rolled her eyes as if to say, ‘Lord, why me?’ and asked something along the lines of, Which one? The other three drunks, Frank, Ray, and our gallant chauffeur, all pointed in my direction, and I was admitted on Tuesday, April 19, 1977. I have not had a drink or a non-prescribed drug ever since that moment.

INTRODUCTION

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I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I decided to begin this book at the end — the end being my last few weeks of drinking. The best answer I could summon was this: it felt right. It felt like the natural place to begin the examination of my relationship with alcohol and drugs. Prior to April 20, 1977, the morning after I was dumped into detox by Dick and Ray, I had never done so, not honestly anyway. And it had become clear to me, in retrospect, I drank almost every time the opportunity presented itself, but I never considered why. I enjoyed drinking, very much so. And I enjoyed being drunk. When I was sober, especially in a social setting, I felt uncomfortable, stupid, and unattractive. I felt less than others. I felt as though I didn’t belong. I didn’t fit in. When I was high, on the other hand, I felt glib, intelligent, attractive, and in control, like I was being included. So why then wouldn’t I want to be high? It felt comfortable. Is that why I became an alcoholic? Doubtful.

But it is why I drank as much and as often as I did. For years, I controlled when I drank. I just couldn’t control how, because once I started, I didn’t stop. Not until they closed the bar, or I ran out of money…was thrown out…or both. And I had never stopped to examine my drinking and drugging behavior. Speaking of drugging, I guess I should mention I had never actually used a drug until sometime in late 1963. I was in the Marine Corps and had noticed Ernie Wilson sitting on the ledge just outside the window of our barracks, smoking something that didn’t smell like a cigarette. He invited me to join him. So, I climbed out onto the ledge, about three stories up, and smoked my first joint. It was okay, but definitely not as good as alcohol. So, over the next fourteen years or so, I tried different drugs: uppers, downers, Valium, mescaline, Quaaludes, speed, cocaine, THC, weed, angel dust, you name it, but I never liked any of them more than alcohol.

Back to April 20, 1977, and the morning after, the morning that ended that unexamined, drinking and drugging period of my life forever. That morning, I began to suspect Socrates’s dictum, an unexamined life is not worth living, might be true. Until that day, I had no purpose to my life. Of course, I wanted to be happy, successful, loved, and admired, but I had no real purpose beyond that. Nor had I considered the possibility there even could be one.

The hospital had diagnosed me as a chronic alcoholic (whatever the hell that was) and suggested I do something about it. I guess that was just the kick in the ass I needed, because at that moment I looked at my life and could see clearly that drinking had caused every major problem that befell me. So, first order of business was to stop drinking until I figured out what the hell was going on. I began to examine my relationship with alcohol. I weighed what it contributed….and what it had cost me. As I delved deeper, I noticed that in the recovery community, there was no consistent consensus as to what an alcoholic or a drug addict really was. I found many definitions as to what constituted sobriety, or what constituted a recovery, but not one universally consistent definition as to how to measure either.

Different organizations, programs, and rehabs claim they have successful recovery rates ranging from 5 percent to 95 percent, but there is no consistent opinion as to what determines a recovery to be successful…or how to quantify it. Over the years, I have called many of these programs, scrutinized their websites, read their brochures, and checked their reviews. I have personally experienced a detox, two rehabs, and one halfway house. I know hundreds of people who have gone through rehabs and outpatient programs, and in none of these cases can anyone, patient, program or otherwise, clearly state what it is they use to determine a successful recovery or how it is measured. It’s also worth mentioning, there has never been an attempt to follow up or monitor the progress of my own recovery. No one has ever called and asked me how I was doing or if I was still sober. I have asked others as well (hundreds of them!) if anyone has followed up with them regarding their recoveries, and I have yet to find a single person able to answer in the affirmative.

I consider myself a renaissance man of recovery. I say this because I am a generalist, an expert without a portfolio, so to speak. I am not a doctor, psychologist, or certified counselor; I don’t have any degrees in the field. What I do have is forty-five years of experience interacting with people trying to get sober and straight, as well as many of the people who have (mostly without success) tried to support them. I am a treasure trove of information on alcoholism and drug addiction and how to effect a cure (please note: I did not say cure alcoholic or addict, I said alcoholism and addiction). I currently disseminate this crucial information piecemeal to a limited audience; a method that severely limits my scope. The purpose of this book is to compile everything I know about the subject and make it available to anyone and everyone who has an interest in ameliorating the damage done by alcoholism and drug addiction. I hope to bring some clarity to the subject, dispel any myths, and point out pitfalls, mistakes, and the outright lies that get in the way of recovery and/or those who support addicts and alcoholics in their efforts.

It is possible I may be the world’s greatest expert on how to recover, and I believe what I’ve learned and have to offer on the subject can make a tremendous difference in the field. I’m only writing it down now, because it has taken over four decades to amass this knowledge, and if I die tomorrow, it all goes with me. Everything I know, believe, and have learned will wink out of existence and along with it the chance to help countless others. If I don’t share what I know, the past forty-five years will have pretty much been wasted and will indicate to me that, when I close my eyes for the last time, I was pretty much full of shit. A person who talked the talk, but didn’t walk the walk.

Before we begin, I need to point out two major problems that I noticed have held back progress in handling the world’s drug and alcohol problem. First is the human propensity to look for the answer or solution. To be clear, looking for an answer or solution is not a problem. I am talking about the answer, the solution, or the formula. A.A.’s literature actually states there is a solution, and this is not only the tendency of A.A. but of all organizations in the recovery field. My forty-five years of experience and analyses tells me that before any individual, organization, or program can effectively tackle the job of