I'm Definitely Right

 "All we really have is now.  We have no past time and no future time.  As the saying goes: 'Yesterday is gone, forget it.  Tomorrow never comes, don't worry about it.  Today is here so get busy.'"

I was pondering the drinking coffee with LSD Tom part of my coffee shop experience yesterday.  I really shouldn't mark my friend Tom with an LSD descriptive.  In my defense I wouldn't say this to anyone but SuperK but that's a shallow and half-assed excuse that gives me license to demean someone with a condescending qualifier.  Also, in my defense, it's a pretty fucking funny nickname.

Anyway, I really like this guy.  He's a good, honest man who treats people well and is a solid father and provides good, honest financial advice to the clients of his investment business.  His big problem is that he wants to use the occasional hallucinogen to enhance his live concert experiences.  I really can't argue with his general rationale as I'd like to smoke a little heroin first thing every morning to take the edge off.  He defends his behavior by loosely interpreting the A.A. principle of "the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking" as an OK to use drugs.   He knows he drank too much so he doesn't do that anymore but the drugs?  He doesn't perceive that to be a problem.  I really can't argue with that disturbed manner of thinking, either, as a dude who has a sobriety date that falls roughly six months after he took his last drink.  You do the calculus.

I grew up in a rigorous academic environment where we were always encouraged to go to the source, to never take anything for granted, to research and research and then do some more research.  The Mother Ship for alcoholics is NY Central Office.  If you've never been in touch with them I highly recommend it - there will be a person assigned to your geographical area who will actually respond to your inquiry.  I've contacted them periodically over the years and their response is predictably anodyne, usually along the lines of "the individual (or the group, as the case may be) is free to do whatever they (it) want(s) as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else."  Another favorite comment is "anyone who says he's a member of Alcoholics Anonymous is indeed a member."

I chuckled a bit at the calculated nimbleness of LSD Tom's defense of his behavior.  There is absolutely nothing in our literature that says drug use is a sobriety disqualifier and NY absolutely refused to take a stance on whether what he was doing was copacetic or not.  "What he decides is sobriety is none of our business" was their response.  "We have no opinion whatsover about drug use - we're in the alcohol business only" followed that line of reasoning.

Tom understands what I think about drugs.  I was his sponsor for a while until he quit calling me.  I don't harangue anyone about anything but my disapproval was palpable so he probably got uncomfortable with our interchanges - my stance is if you think that drug use is an acceptable part of sobriety you should find a sponsor who also believes that.  In a funny side not he asked my sponsor if he would sponsor him - so I guess I'm out - and he preemptively brought up the drug use conundrum so maybe I taught him something.  My sponsor tried to keep a straight face as he politely declined his offer.  I've always encouraged people to bring up confusing matters as a topic at one of their regular meetings - that way you get advice from a cross-section of our membership and you don't have to rely on the maybe-flawed advice of one person.  I can assure you he hasn't done this.  I'm assuming he knows what would happen if he did.  In most things I can't say "I'm definitely right" but here's one where I'm definitely right.