Narcotics Anonymous is a worldwide organization which sprang from the Alcoholics Anonymous Program of the late 1940s, with NA meetings first emerging in the Los Angeles area of California, in the early 1950s. The NA program has grown into one of the world’s oldest and largest international organizations of its type. In 1983, Narcotics Anonymous published its self-titled Basic Text book, which contributed to its tremendous growth. Today the organization is a worldwide multilingual multicultural fellowship with more than 58,000 weekly meetings in 131 countries. NA’s earliest self-titled pamphlet, known among members as “the White Booklet,” describes Narcotics Anonymous this way: “NA is a nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem. We … meet regularly to help each other stay clean. … We are not interested in what or how much you used ... but only in what you want to do about your problem and how we can help.”
Membership is open to all drug addicts, regardless of the particular drug or combination of drugs used. When adapting AA’s First Step, the word “addiction” was substituted for “alcohol,” thus removing drug-specific language and reflecting the “disease concept” of addiction. Narcotics Anonymous provides a recovery process and peer support network that are linked together. One of the keys to NA’s success is the therapeutic value of addicts working with other addicts. Members share their successes and challenges in overcoming active addiction and living drug-free, productive lives through the application of the principles contained within the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of NA. Narcotics Anonymous itself is a non-religious program of recovery; each member is encouraged to cultivate an individual understanding—religious or not—of the spiritual principles and apply these principles to everyday life.
There are no social, religious, economic, racial, ethnic, national, gender, or class-status membership restrictions. There are no dues or fees for membership; most members regularly contribute in meetings to help cover the expenses incurred for the rent of facility space.
At Christ Church, NA meetings took place on Sunday evenings from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., and a collection is taken from those in attendance as a donation for use of the space. To help protect the privacy of meeting participants, Christ Church does not schedule other events simultaneously with NA's meetings.
