It's St. Valentine's Day 2002. Today is the last day I will see my friend Adam. Our table is wedged in a corner of our favorite coffee hangout. Maybe Adam and I don't have much in common other than a love of basking in the sunshine outside this place in the summer. His fiancˇe moved out of their house in December because he was smoking cocaine and injecting heroin. They had a fight last night, and today when he called her to ask if she would be his Valentine, she was not exactly warm. Now he's sitting here visibly troubled telling me that he does not know if they are going to make it. One day in October he shot-up and nodded-off across his desk in his home office. He lay there pinching the inside of his right arm against his desktop for five hours. It took over two months for the nerves to regenerate and the use of his right hand to return. The experience scared the hell out of him, and he vowed never to stick another needle in his arm.

He had been clean for over six years until September 2001. He had built a good life for himself during those years. He was self-employed. Engaged to be married. He was a fit tri-athlete. I met him in 1991 while we were both residents of Arrigoni House, a sort of flophouse for people who had been through rehab and were ostensibly trying to get on to other things. Arrigoni House is owned and operated by a fundamentalist Christian family. Though the proselytizing is minimal, bibles are available and clients are invited to attend their church services. Resident-clients are responsible for daily chores and to be active in some sort of recovery program, usually A.A. or religious activities. Arrigoni House has a motto: "Bringing Hope to the Hopeless."

Adam had come to Minnesota in the late 1980s seeking treatment at Hazelden and Hazelden's Fellowship Club halfway house. He kept his discharge papers from Hazelden preserved in a scrapbook. They stated that the outlook for Adam was not good. They predicted he would use drugs again because he did not fully comply with their program: he was not interested in A.A., he did not get a sponsor, he found a romantic partner while at Fellowship Club.

Adam became scarce soon after I moved out of Arrigoni House. The next news of him came almost a year later. The rumor was that he had been found blue-faced on someone's front step several times, and it was so. He had overdosed and found his way to intensive care units a total of five times from 1992 to 1995 when he finally arrested his addiction.

In 1995 Adam went through another Twelve Step treatment program, Twin Town of St. Paul, Minnesota, and then moved into a therapeutic community/halfway house called Progress Valley in the heart of Uptown Minneapolis. Progress Valley's approach is excessively confrontational. Residents are allowed very little peace and privacy. They must attend multiple A.A. meetings each week, and adhere to a long list of fastidious rules and regulations. They bounce a quarter on your bed each morning to check that it has been properly made. He played it square to avoid their abuse. At his graduation ceremony, his counselor came down on him for managing to comply with Progress Valley's rules and thus avoiding any "grouping" (intense pressure sessions where the group puts a deviant in the hot seat and bombs them with "tough love.") He told Adam that he thought this was a sign that success may elude him on the outside. It would seem the professionals at Hazelden and now Progress Valley had unconditionally damned him from the beginning.

He caught up with me at my A.A. home group later in 1995. I quit A.A. in 1997 after thirteen years of meetings. I had finally recognized that A.A. was part of my problem and not part of any solution. But that's another story. My former sponsor, Pat, a very serious Big Book guru, would become Adam's sponsor. Adam and I resumed our friendship. By 1999 I was seeing him at least twice a week as we lived in the same neighborhood and both worked a minimum of hours. So we started drinking iced-coffee in the sweltering sun, getting tan, swimming at the beach, laughing, and arguing politics: he on the right, me left of center.

Adam had Restless Leg Syndrome, a neurological disorder that interferes with sleeping. He had tried many treatments. Finally he got a prescription for klonopin, a benzodiazepine. He was concerned about taking it. He had a history of abusing prescription drugs, and was worried that this medication may not be such a good idea. I laughed at Adam when he told me he had consulted his sponsor Pat who tested him by asking, "How is your spiritual condition?" Stupid question really, Adam was not a "spiritual" person. Not only was this a stupid question, it was irrelevant and a deliberate jab at Adam's incomplete assimilation into Pat's A.A. Adam was a practical realist. He had little time for bullshit and could smell manipulation a mile a way.

He took the medication as prescribed twice. On the third day he took twice the normal dose in the evening instead of immediately before bed. He got high. I never did get a clear account of his intentions. But he had learned in Hazelden and A.A. that the sight of pills was a "trigger" which he was powerless over. That once you take intoxicants into your body, a physical compulsion beyond your control takes over. One drink was too little and a thousand never enough.

Adam reported that one of his next thoughts was that cocaine combined with the klonopin might be a good mix. This was a sort of mock speedball cocktail. Speedball is what junkies call the combination of heroin and cocaine. The cocaine high can be overwhelming, so a touch of a downer like heroin or a benzodiazepine like valium or klonopin can "balance" things out - in theory. Adam once described the experience like a bodily tug-o-war with your heart in the middle. It's a lethal combination and a lot of people who try it die. By now he was keeping step with the blueprint of progression the professionals had drafted for him. He had no other training in managing this situation.

When he ran out of klonopin he substituted alcohol. His A.A. friends, including his sponsor Pat, started telling him about a place called The Retreat where he could rest and put together some clean time while he steeped in A.A. indoctrination for 30 days. Feeling desperate with limited options, overwhelmed by cocaine cravings, frightened for his health and livelihood, he arranged to be admitted to The Retreat. The weekend before he was admitted, he purposefully set out to get in that one last ultimate high from his all time favorite, heroin. He shot up and fell asleep across his desk. He woke up with nerve damage in his right arm on the day he checked into The Retreat.

The Retreat portrays itself as a sort of spiritual retreat for A.A. members. In reality it is a hardcore A.A.-based treatment program. The president of The Retreat, and principal designer of The Retreat model, happens to be Adam's first drug rehab counselor at Hazelden, the same one who wrote up his discouraging discharge papers years ago. His name is John Curtiss, an A.A. elder and respected rehab professional with over 24 years experience. Curtiss has worked as an educator in chemical dependency counseling programs at both Hazelden and Rutgers School. He serves on the boards of Sobriety High, New Foundations, and the Association of Alcoholism Halfway House Programs of North America.

The Retreat was founded by a group of affluent and prominent A.A. members in the Twin Cities who call themselves The Community of Recovering People (C.O.R.P.). John Curtiss is president of C.O.R.P. They were unhappy that some treatment centers were parting with a strict Twelve Step approach, so they created a program based entirely on Big Book A.A. They believe, as do many A.A. members, that people fail in A.A. because they are not getting a "pure" enough A.A. message. Since it is not licensed as an official treatment center but a spiritual "retreat" they do not have any nursing or medical staff and offer no physical rehabilitation or detoxification. All of their clientele were chronic relapsers from the St. Paul-Minneapolis A.A. community. Many of them were people like Adam who had come from all over the world to Minnesota to be treated at Hazelden or one of the state's other 10,000 rehab programs only to find that treatment didn't work.

Money is not the root of C.O.R.P.'s evil. Rather the danger in this A.A. promotional organization is its members' righteousness. They have the answer if these chronic relapsers will only practice A.A.'s Twelve Steps properly. And if they won't or can't, C.O.R.P. makes it implicitly clear that they have one alternative: death. They are relentlessly insistent that A.A. should work for everyone, and they remain unaware of alternatives that have worked equally as well for people who do not respond to A.A. But A.A. is a movement. It is not a remedy. So none of this should come as surprise.

What's that old definition of insanity? Doing the same thing again and again while expecting different results? These relapsers are usually people who have been through multiple Twelve-Step-based rehab programs, they have attended hundreds if not thousands of A.A. meetings, the have been sponsored, they have had sponsees of their own, they have read Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions many times, they understand their problem as a disease or illness over which they have no control. For some of them this has become a way of life. They enter rehab when they have trouble. They return to A.A. upon their release. Problems resurface and they are back in rehab learning all the same things again complaining that they are out of control just as their oh-so-smart counselors and sponsors prophesized the last time around.

Here's a quote from The Retreat's web page:

"In 1991, a group of dedicated professionals [A.A. members themselves] and recovered individuals [more A.A. members] shared their growing concerns about the changing treatment environment -- difficulty accessing services, increased cost, reduced length of stays and diminishing focus on the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. In response, The Community of Recovering People (CORP), a non-profit organization, was formed to explore new, more accessible approaches to sobriety." [emphasis added]

The Retreat's "new, more accessible approach to sobriety" turns out to be nothing more than doing the same thing again expecting different results. It's hardcore A.A.! And it has been proven to be undesirable and ineffective for most people! The story of their formation is nearly a repeat of the efforts of those A.A. members who first convened in 1947 to discuss the formation of a bucolic A.A.-based treatment facility that would become Hazelden.

The Retreat advertises its program as "immersion in the spiritual principles embodied in the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous." All of the reading material used at The Retreat is A.A. General Service Conference-approved literature. Their logo even includes a backdrop of the A.A. symbol - a triangle within a circle. They are staffed by A.A. members. Their program consists of daily Big Book studies with written assignments and worksheets, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions studies, lectures on the twelve steps, attendance at outside A.A. meetings, attendance at inside meetings. They are to begin working with A.A. sponsors. Visitors are restricted to Sundays and required to attend an Alanon luncheon with prayer and speakers with emphasis on the need for the visitor to practice A.A. principles too. They recommend that graduates of their 30-day program move into one of several Retreat Residences for an indefinite period. The Residences are group homes where mandatory Big Book study groups are facilitated by C.O.R.P. members and supporters - hardcore Big Book A.A. types who are known to have multiple sponsees and belong to a clique of "A.A. elites." Attendance at several A.A. meetings each week is required. Residence clients must get sponsors and commit to service work at the local A.A. Intergroup office. They are encouraged to participate in A.A. outreach work, and opportunities to do so are provided.

After nearly 30 days at The Retreat, Adam was transported to a hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. The doctor diagnosed him with clinical exhaustion and dehydration and told him that he should leave The Retreat and go home and get some rest. Adam could not sleep due to ongoing RLS problems, insufficient heating, and insect infestation. He reported that the radiators were ice cold at night and that the rooms were crawling with Asian beetles, little ladybug-like creatures that like warm places. He could not bear to drink the water because it was coming out of an old private well and had an unpleasant odor. Adam was so frightened and confused by his relapse that he had tolerated these conditions to the detriment of his health in hope that what The Retreat and A.A. were telling him would come true. When he asked that these conditions be corrected he was either ignored by an overworked staff, or admonished by his peers to suck it up and show some "willingness" and "gratitude."

The staff had recommended that upon graduation Adam leave his regular occupation and go live in one of their Residences for a minimum of six months. His "number two" sponsor, Jeff had also recommended Adam leave his normal occupation. Adam had worked hard over the previous seven years to build a good life for himself. He was self-employed. He had purchased a house with his fiancˇe the year before. He had a daughter by a previous relationship. He had responsibilities and a good life he needed to return to, and now these so-called "professionals" were suggesting that he give all that up to go and live in one of their Residences. Never mind that he had done so well without any of their "suggestions" for the previous seven years. It's as if they wanted to try to create consequences for his drug use where there were none: give up your home, your job, time with your fiancˇe, time with your daughter. Give yourself to A.A., and go live with this new peer group of very unstable transients.

Because Adam followed his doctor's recommendations and did not complete The Retreat's program, and because Adam moved back into his own home and did not move into one of the Residences, the staff at The Retreat treated Adam as if he were anathema to other clients. They stood in the way of his attempts to maintain his new friendships and to help some of his Retreat acquaintances get to A.A. meetings. He was essentially ostracized and alienated by The Retreat staff whose professional advice had formerly been that he would need to stay close to them in the long term in order to succeed! He had done his utmost to comply with their recommendations in every way he could. He believed that his life depended on it. And now he was getting a very mixed message. It was deeply confusing and hurtful to him. It put him out in the cold.

Yet Adam spoke incessantly about how grateful he was for having gone through their program, how grateful he was for the staff there, how grateful he was for the atmosphere of emphasized altruism and the readiness with which his Retreat "brothers" offered to help him do things that he could not do with his injured hand, how grateful he was to be sober, how grateful he was for A.A., how grateful he was to have begun praying.

Then one day some of his Retreat friends joined us for coffee. They all smiled and talked about how grateful they were for all these things too. It seemed to be the only thing they had in common. And it seemed to be the only thing they had learned at The Retreat: "How to Be Grateful for The Retreat and Say It". I couldn't help but think that my friend had been brainwashed. He was under some sort of contrived and quickly fading spell. I had never heard him talk like this about anything, and yet in some private moments he would talk about the living conditions at The Retreat and how his complaints were ignored, how he was afraid to complain lest he be accused of being "unwilling", and how he was puzzled and hurt that they were now treating him differently.

I could see that something was really wrong with that place. I was thinking it, but even I was afraid to speak up and say, "Adam, what the hell is going on in that crazy fucking place?" I was afraid I would burst whatever false bubble had become his new psychological dependence. He was not using drugs and seemed to be fairly stable at this point. But he was attributing all this to The Retreat and to A.A. If cracks should appear, it seemed his whole world would collapse.

Adam was using cocaine again just a couple weeks later. He battled with the cravings for several weeks and then his fiancˇe moved out of their home. An acquaintance he had made at The Retreat offered to pay for another 30-day term. So he made arrangements to check back in. Two mornings later I got a call from Adam. He was crying and explaining that he had been kicked out of The Retreat because this acquaintance had checked him in but had not made any payment. When Adam asked him why he hadn't paid, the man said that he figured that if he could get Adam to check-in that God would take care of the rest! The embarrassing situation made Adam even more unpopular with The Retreat staff and added to his confusion.

Adam was panicked. He pleaded, "I can do this. Right? I don't need to hit bottom, do I? Things don't need to get any worse for me to turn this around. Right?" These are not the words of a man who has been trained to think for him self, to make healthful decisions, to operate from a place of integrity. They are not the words of a rational adult. They are the words of a scared child. A.A. taught my friend how to retreat into childish submission to A.A. guidance, and if he didn't do that, their opinion was that he could not arrest his addiction. And Adam believed in A.A. He trusted these people above all else. Granted, they had trained him to do so.

Adam said a number of things during this period that stand out to me now. I have already mentioned his belief that he would have to hit some sort of bottom before he could get better. He told me one day that sometimes when he goes to meetings and Big Book studies he feels like getting high, but when he doesn't go to meetings he doesn't even think about it much. He explained that it was because they always keep the drug experience so fresh in your mind and emphasize that you might slip. He also said that the Step Two insanity rap made him feel less capable. What purpose could instilling these fears have other than to make someone cling even tighter to A.A.? And who does that clinging really serve but the frightened leaders of A.A., the John Curtisses, the Pats, the other sponsors, the Twelve Step Movement activists - the people whose own "sobriety" allegedly depends on carrying the message of A.A.

Adam seemed less interested in our friendship and any support I was giving him through this whole experience. He even seemed suspicious of what I had to offer and asked me not to talk about certain things. Granted, what I had to say often contradicted what the A.A. people were telling him, but I never told him not to go to A.A. I supported it so long as he believed it was helpful to him. We would have very rational conversations about his situation and then he would rush off to his A.A. sponsors, Pat and Jeff.

Pat and Jeff made a Twelfth Step call on Adam one afternoon while his fiancˇe was still living with him. Jeff brought his wife who is an Alanon member. Her role was to distract Adam's fiancˇe. She took her out for coffee and told her all the great things about Alanon while the boys worked on Adam with their A.A. stuff. This came as a great frustration to Adam's fiancˇe as she wanted to be able to play an active role in helping him. She wanted to be back at the house helping her husband-to-be make a plan, but good old Pat and Jeff and his wife were communicating she could only be a hindrance unless she joined Alanon and started working the Twelve Steps herself. She never did learn what Pat and Jeff said to Adam. Not fifteen minutes after she returned home Adam was out the door shopping for cocaine not to return home that night.

Pat and Jeff are old chums. They have a seemingly endless arsenal of shocking stories from their good old days of using drugs together. Pat is also Jeff's sponsor. I sat in many a Big Book study and A.A. meeting with these two. They have been around St. Paul A.A. for years and are both among the old-timer-insiders. Both of these men have planned suicide-relapses for themselves in recent years. Pat had planned to rent a hotel room and drink himself into a coma. Jeff sat at a kitchen table full of bottles one afternoon preparing to drink to his death when his wife walked in on him. Adam reported these things over coffee one day prior to his own relapse. Adam often said that he would listen to Pat over others because he always documented what he was saying with the Big Book rather than just giving his own opinion.

I remember Pat making that exact boast in many A.A. meetings. "This is not about my program or your program. There is just one program here and it is the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is the program that is detailed in the Big Book, and it is the program that I carry to others in these meetings." It's the exact same false humility of the religious bigot who claims that his assertions are not his own, but that they are the words of the Bible and therefore the words of God. Pat told me on numerous occasions that he believes in his heart that the Big Book was divinely inspired from God to Bill Wilson. So A.A. sponsors like Pat can never be held personally accountable for the things they say. How convenient! A.A. truly is a selfish program. It's simply frightening, and A.A. is a breeding ground for this behavior.

People like Pat seem to have an abysmal need for approval and adoration. Maybe a lack of belongingness is a common feature of many addictions. Sponsors gain followers by claiming to offer something other than their personal opinion. They are offering an unadulterated solution and claim to be making no selfish demands on the person who is seeking help. They appear genuine and routinely state that they are merely reporting what the book says. This is all very appealing to someone who is vulnerable and confused and in need of some assistance or support. Here's someone with an answer! Once they have gained someone's trust, they feel they have done something good by passing the A.A. message along. They have performed their duty, and thus begins the gratification of their need for approval and adoration and belonging. So they don't have to drink today. Congratulations.

Both Pat and Adam got a false sense of belonging at the expense of their integrity. This is the price the addict pays to his drug of choice, and it is the same price the A.A. member often pays to his sponsor of choice and to A.A. as a whole. They both purchase an illusion. It's similar to the unhealthy psychological exchange that happens in cults like Scientology, The Moonies, and others. Though A.A.W.S. won't ever force anyone to drink poisoned coffee, Jim Jones's victims were victims of a greater lie long before they drank that punch.

Adam did not return my calls for several days. I drove by his house and saw that all the blinds were drawn shut and every light in the place was on. I usually won't drop in on my friends uninvited. And from what scenes Adam had described in the preceding weeks with drug dealers cooking crack cocaine in his kitchen and other sordid nonsense, I was simply not about to knock on his door. Some of us talked seriously about forcing our way into his home and physically restraining him to monitor his detoxification. But we imagined coercion would be futile. We talked to him when he would make himself available. We tried to motivate him and encourage him. He really hadn't lost much and had a lot more going for him.

I continued to call, to send email, to send instant messages when he was online. I knew he was using cocaine again, but I did not know he had a heroin source. Finally he called me on February 19th after I sent him an email imploring him to take charge of the situation and start calling people. He said in a very syrupy voice, "I'm on crack again and drinking. But I'm going to quit tomorrow." We talked for a while about what had been happening. He sounded really bad, but I could tell he really wanted to stop. He thanked me for my email messages, and agreed to call me first thing in the morning.

I later learned that Adam had found a heroin source the day before that last conversation. One particularly odious member of the A.A. community had been trying to get Adam to stop too. His name was Jon. Jon told me that he had walked into Adam's house one day with one of Adam's Retreat brothers. Adam lay on the floor snuggling with his cat. Jon pressed him for information on what lead to his relapse. He pushed him and insisted that there must be some secret he had kept. Adam finally confessed that he had been molested by somebody in his neighborhood when he was a boy.

This is nearly impossible to verify. Jon was not a reliable source. He loved dramatic embellishment and was known to tell some amazing lies and do some heinous things. And knowing Adam and his dislike of Jon, he could have been telling him anything just to get him to stop prodding.

Three months later, in June of 2002, Jon died of a heroin overdose himself.

Adam considered me his best friend and he had divulged a lot of stuff over the years. He had a very open relationship with his fiancˇe too. Adam didn't really show any of the classic signs of having something like sexual abuse lurking in the background. But it wouldn't surprise me if this were part of the picture. If he had been between a rock and a hard place, this would have been an understandable and common hard place for people with addictions, and A.A. the rock he kept running to.

I got a call from Adam's fiancˇe on the morning of 25 February 2002. She had found Adam on his office floor next to a crack pipe with a syringe and spoon on his desktop. It was Monday morning. He had probably died late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. "I'm calling to tell you that Adam is no longer with us."

I spent the afternoon with her and another close friend of Adam. It was a dark and icy day. We sat emptily by candlelight while she made many brave phone calls.

In the evening I made a trip to an A.A. meeting to inform some people. His fiancˇe knew that Adam respected John Curtiss and that he and others at The Retreat would want to know. The meeting was just getting out. The first person I recognized was John Curtiss. I told him what had happened, and his face cracked into a strange mix of amusement and shock as he said, "Oh, man. Isn't this some disease?" He then went on to say, "You know, we tried to get Adam to go that extra little...", and then he grimaced and shook his head in amazement.

I told him I felt that Adam's private evasiveness was part of his unique charm to which John gave me a funny look. It was clear to me that John, one of the people Adam respected most, knew and respected Adam least. John's rather conceited understanding of Adam's demise was that he had not done precisely what John and the people at The Retreat had told him to do. "This disease" had got another one. To him it was proof to continue doing what he has been doing for years. In John's mind it was the so-called "disease", not his brand of A.A., not some flaw in the A.A.-rehab system that could be at fault - not his attempts to Re-treat these people instead of doing the professionally ethical thing of learning about realistic alternatives for those whom it isn't working. John Curtiss did not appear at Adam's wake or memorial.

Pat and Jeff attended both events. Adam's fiancˇe hosted the memorial reception in her home. Pat and Jeff sat in her living room regaling a small group of Adam's bereaved acquaintances with stories of their wild youthful days of drug and alcohol abuse. Jeff was egging Pat on, encouraging him to tell about increasingly outrageous and ridiculous misdeeds all relating to mass consumption of drugs. It was like sitting in a room with Beavis and Butthead in their early 50s. This appallingly inappropriate bragging went on for some time. Adam's brother quietly got up and left the room. Had I not been sick and in such a state of emotional paralysis I have no doubt there would have been a scene.

I had been absent from A.A. for several years when Adam died. The few months leading up to his death and the few days of contact with A.A. people afterward were stark reminders of my reasons for leaving: so much stubborn dogma, so much insistent fatalism, so much manipulation and psychological bondage, the readiness with which they used Adam's demise as an example for others to follow them - as a selfish deterrent to keep themselves sober "just for today" - to justify their A.A. membership, the lack of depth, the lack of simplicity, the lack of genuine humanity, the righteousness.

Had you met Adam in the summer of 2001 you would have thought, "Now here is a handsome, charming, fun, bright, athletic, man." You would have been impressed with his candor and his sense of realism and independence. You would have laughed with him. He would have uttered some archaic idiom or used some word you've never heard. If you were a conservative you would have agreed on a lot of things. If you were a liberal, you better have had a good sense of humor. You'd probably have sensed that his mind was on other things or places if you spent enough time with him, and you'd catch some sun doing it. He just wanted to be. Maybe that's what he and I had most in common. And so I know that he would prefer to be now.

Adam is getting up from our table. His face looks tense and perplexed. I sense that he is not going to be okay. I have plans to have pizza with some other friends tonight. He tells me he might give me a call later and then sort of tunes out as he walks away. I'm really tired of the pattern of the past few months. But I am optimistic that he will make healthy choices for himself tonight as he has been more like himself the past couple months.