Written by, Al E.

The sixties, everybody was tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. I wanted to feel a part of it all. Love-ins, concerts, flowers in my hair, Beatles, Doors, Stones, and even the music went against the “norm.” I’d swear to this day that the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper told us to “smoke pot, smoke pot everybody smoke pot.”

So I did, didn’t everybody? Why if Richard Nixon had only smoked pot things wouldn’t have been so messed up. Then my heroes started to die. First, Hendrix, then Joplin, Morrison, and later on it would be Belushi, before him Bonham, the list is so you – you know their names. But I was in denial, I couldn’t see that I was on the same road. I was still mad at the world and questioning authority, filling up my resentment list daily and drinking and using to cope. When I finally got sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, I called an A.A. hotline and learned about the dis-ease called addiction. I knew alcohol was a problem, but I still figured I could go back to smoking dope after I took the time to clean out. A few weeks into sobriety and the cravings for pot were unbearable. I shared about it at an A.A. meeting and someone told me about MA. I went to a meeting the next night and knew I was at home. I could easily identify with everybody, we were all trying to stop the same drug. Alcohol had brought me to my bottom, but pot had kept me there. Talking about cunning, baffling and powerful, nothing fits that description better than Marijuana. 

It’s now almost twenty months later and I feel as if I’m finally usually happy, occasionally joyous, and definitely free from the desire to use marijuana. MA has given me so much. It’s given me friends I know I can count on, even when the going gets rough. It’s given me principles to live by, an altered attitude not possible without the Twelve Steps and the people who live by them. I even have a higher power I choose to call God. For a recovering atheist, that’s saying a lot. I trust my higher power in a way I never though possible. He gives me strength in ways I never knew before and grants me serenity at times when it doesn’t even seem possible. I thank God daily for the gift of recovery and ask that he show me his will in ways that I can understand. I strive for progress, not perfection, and I’m a lot less resentful and angry. Oh, sure I fall back into my “stinkin’ thinkin’ ” sometimes, but I’m able to recognize it for what it is and turn it around, in time.

It really seems that God is doing for me what I am unable to do for myself. He helps me solve my problems by leading the way to the right person, who gives me direction or just grants me enough patience to figure it out for myself, either through some pertinent reading in the big book, or some other recovery book. Sometimes he just sticks a newcomer in front of me to remind me of where I come from. I keep coming back and “One Day at a Time” I feel better. Thanks, God.

Published in A New Leaf – May 1991