Drugs, Medication, and Alcoholics Anonymous

I have a few books and pamphlets that I read each morning in my Quiet Time.  They come and go, ebb and flow, I like something until I get bored with it and put it into mothballs for a while, I add something new and it often works but sometimes it doesn't and that's all okay.  I picked up the Bible again - a book I've read a few times and found very comforting - and tried some Old Testament stuff and then right back onto the bookshelf it went.  Too many suggestions that I beg for forgiveness and watch out for eternal damnation and so on and so forth.  Too many pithy little aphorisms in Proverbs: "A wise man is like a tree that grows strong and true."  What the fuck does that mean?  Too much psalming in Psalms.  Not sure why this is surprising.  The definition of a psalm is a sacred song or hymn that, while it can be read, is meant to be sung.  I'm officially banned from any song singing in the Seaweed household because of a really, really awful singing voice and even if this wasn't true I can't see myself singing at 6 AM.  And who among us isn't suspicious of a word that begins with a P and then has an S?  C'mon.  Put some effort into it.

I picked up a couple of Alcoholics Anonymous pamphlets at my meeting and added them into the space left vacant by the Bible rotating out.  It has two sections, more or less: one devoted to stories about people who have a mental illness that no amount of Step work is going to cure and the other to those of us (I'm looking at you, Seaweed) who tried to justify drug use as a habit that wasn't a habit.  In the first case, well, yeah.  A guy who has been coming to our meeting for years - smart dude, seriously, but looking more and more ravaged as time passes - paused one morning and asked in a moment of clarity: "Let me ask you a question: Do you hear voices in your head?"  This guy can work The Steps from now to eternity and he's never going to get better without medication.  Just because you can't isolate definitively 

The second category is a little more insidious.  I think often of my buddy LSD Tom who threw up a fearsome defense when I called him out on his occasional use of hallucinogens and stimulants.  And he was able to back it up with some pretty impressive A.A. dogma; we are, after all, an organization that stays out of anything that isn't alcohol related.  I even called the folks at our N.Y. Central Office and they didn't touch the topic with a ten foot pole: "Not our business, dude."  Who among us defiant alcoholics wants to be told what to do?  Who among us, when told what to do, defiantly does the opposite thing?  We're like feral animals - you can't just sit down and pet us.  You've got to put a bowl of food out so we can get close . .  . but not too close.  All I can do is explain what worked for me; suggest that any troublesome topic be shared with lots of different people; and - the real test of valor - bring it up as a topic at a meeting.  No one ever does this, as you might imagine.