Welcome to Narcotics Anonymous

What is our message? The message is that an addict, any addict, can stop using drugs, lose the desire to use, and find a new way to live. Our message is hope and the promise of freedom.

PSA Overlay

“When new members come to meetings, our sole interest is in their desire for freedom from active addiction and how we can be of help.”

It Works: How and Why, “Third Tradition”

Is NA for me?

This is a question every potential member must answer for themselves. Here are some recommended resources that may be helpful:

Need help for family or a friend?

NA meetings are run by and for addicts. If you're looking for help for a loved one, you can contact Narcotics Anonymous near you. 

Never before have so many clean addicts, of their own choice and in free society, been able to meet where they please, to maintain their recovery in complete creative freedom.

Basic Text, “We Do Recover”

Narcotics Anonymous sprang from the Alcoholics Anonymous Program of the late 1940s, with meetings first emerging in the Los Angeles area of California, USA, in the early Fifties. The NA program started as a small US movement that has grown into one of the world's oldest and largest organizations of its type.

Today, Narcotics Anonymous is well established throughout much of the Americas, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Newly formed groups and NA communities are now scattered throughout the Indian subcontinent, Africa, East Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Narcotics Anonymous books and information pamphlets are currently available in 49 languages.

Daily Meditations

Just for Today

August 23, 2025

Decision-making

Page 245

Before we got clean, most of our actions were guided by impulse. Today, we are not locked into this type of thinking.

Basic Text, p. 90

Life is a series of decisions, actions, and consequences. When we were using, our decisions were usually driven by our disease, resulting in self-destructive actions and dire consequences. We came to see decision making as a rigged game, one we should play as little as possible.

Given that, many of us have great difficulty learning to make decisions in recovery. Slowly, by working the Twelve Steps, we gain practice in making healthy decisions, ones that give positive results. Where our disease once affected our will and our lives, we ask our Higher Power to care for us. We inventory our values and our actions, check our findings with someone we trust, and ask the God of our understanding to remove our shortcomings. In working the steps we gain freedom from the influence of our disease, and we learn principles of decision making that can guide us in all our affairs.

Today, our decisions and their consequences need not be influenced by our disease. Our faith gives us the courage and direction to make good decisions and the strength to act on them. The result of that kind of decision making is a life worth living.

Just for Today: I will use the principles of the Twelve Steps to make healthy decisions. I will ask my Higher Power for the strength to act on those decisions.

A Spiritual Principle a Day

August 23, 2025

Striving for Emotional Maturity

Page 243

Emotional maturity is our reward for letting go of anger and resentment.

Living Clean, Chapter 7, “Principles, Practice, and Perspective”

Perhaps we've all encountered circumstances when another member gets on our last nerve. When that happens, sometimes it takes everything in us not to attack them, mock them, shut them down using whatever tactic we can. We may want to bolt from the room because we see how this person–who may or may not have wronged us in some way–enjoys the respect of other members in the group. We want to expose them as a fraud and a hypocrite, but we don't. We say nothing because we know our personal feelings about another member should play no role in how, for instance, our area contributes to the region's Fellowship development efforts.

At other business meetings, we'll have no problem keeping our mouths shut because we'd much rather roll our eyes–and smugly watch the same two members battle it out like they always do over the finer points of coordinating an effective public relations campaign. In those situations, we have to stop ourselves from sharing the eye roll with everyone else in the room, revealing our displeasure with the proceedings. We'd love to break our silence by audibly groaning at how much time they are taking up. A member shared, “The second I start thinking about how I'm the only adult in the room, I know I'm not coming from a place of emotional maturity.”

With some practice, we can learn to check ourselves in situations where previously the monster that lives in our head would have burst out in full force in an effort to kill the proceedings. Similarly, we find a way to restrain our inner adolescent, who would snark, scoff, and snipe at members merely for being themselves.

Emotional maturity may not sound like a big enough reward for not acting out on our character defects–but doesn't it make our lives so much more manageable? And peaceful? And isn't that a big part of why we came here in the first place?

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I will practice reining in my reactiveness in situations where my personal feelings about other members serve no relevant purpose. Today emotional maturity is a reasonable reward for those efforts.

Do you need help with a drug problem?

“If you’re new to NA or planning to go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting for the first time, it might be nice to know a little bit about what happens in our meetings. The information here is meant to give you an understanding of what we do when we come together to share recovery…” 

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