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NA members hold nearly 76,000 meetings weekly in 143 countries. We offer recovery from the effects of addiction through working a twelve-step program, including regular attendance at group meetings. The group atmosphere provides help from peers and offers an ongoing support network for addicts who wish to pursue and maintain a drug-free lifestyle.
Our name, Narcotics Anonymous, is not meant to imply a focus on any particular drug; NA’s approach makes no distinction between legal and illegal drugs including alcohol. Membership is free, and we have no affiliation with any organizations outside of NA including governments, religions, law enforcement groups, or medical and psychiatric associations. Through all of our service efforts and our cooperation with others seeking to help addicts, we strive to reach a day when every addict in the world has an opportunity to experience our message of recovery in their own language and culture. This website is the contribution by members living in Ventura County towards that worldwide effort.
We are not alone, you are not alone.
The Narcotics Anonymous message is “that an addict, any addict, can stop using drugs, lose the desire to use and find a new way to live.”
NA is a nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem. We are recovering addicts who meet regularly to help each other stay clean. This is a program of complete abstinence from all drugs. There is only one requirement for membership, the desire to stop using. We suggest that you keep an open mind and give yourself a break. Our program is a set of principles written so simply that we can follow them in our daily lives. The most important thing about them is that they work.
The using life is not a clean one--no one knows this better than we do. Some of us lived in physical squalor, caring neither for our surroundings nor ourselves. Worse, though, than any external filth was the way most of us felt inside. The things we did to get our drugs, the way we treated other people, and the way we treated ourselves had us feeling dirty. Many of us recall waking too many mornings just wishing that, for once, we could feel clean about our ourselves and our lives.
Today, we have a chance to feel clean by living clean. For us addicts, living clean starts with not using--after all, that's our primary use for the word "clean" in Narcotics Anonymous. But as we stay "clean" and work the Twelve Steps, we discover another kind of clean. It's the clean that comes from admitting the truth about our addiction rather than hiding or denying our disease. It's the freshness that comes from owning up to our wrongs and making amends for them. It's the vitality that comes from the new set of values we develop as we seek a Higher Power's will for us. When we practice the principles of our program in all our affairs, we have no reason to feel dirty about our lives or our lifestyles--we're living clean, and grateful to be doing so at last.
"Clean living" used to be just for the "squares." Today, living clean is the only way we'd have it.
Living clean and working the Steps gives us loads of practical experience with applying spiritual principles. Open-mindedness unlocks some doors for us in Step Two, and we learn the benefits of being flexible in our thinking. The trust required to turn our will and lives over in Step Three gives us new confidence in the quiet knowing we might call our faith or intuition. With these and other experiences to draw from, it gets easier to align our actions with spiritual principles. With enough practice, spiritual solutions become second nature. We find ourselves more flexible in our thinking and more ready than ever to engage in creative problem solving.
We practice listening to our intuition and learn to sift out impulses that are rooted in the disease. We tune in to what some call our higher selves, the better angels of our nature, or simply good judgment to find inspiration that's more closely aligned with our spiritual center. One member shared, "With some time clean and some Steps under my belt, I realized that my head wasn't always trying to kill me." Sometimes we're inspired to give up our seat on a crowded bus, to take a panel into a treatment center, or to get back to our education--age be damned!
Creative action of the spirit can lead us in any number of directions. We continue to be amazed by our creative capacity to craft spiritual solutions to the challenge of living life on life's terms. We stumble upon new career paths, find new ways to serve, and learn new lessons. When we are engaged in living in the world and participating with other humans, our focus shifts from our self-centeredness to a more global perspective. That shift might be just what we need to live in the solution as regular contributors to the greater good.