In local communities where Narcotics Anonymous is fairly well established, we offer a number of services designed to make for easy interaction between your clients and our fellowship.
Though we generally do not take a primary role in interventions, we do offer something called a "Twelfth Step call" that could be used as a follow-up to an intervention. If your client agrees, you can call the local NA phoneline and ask that a couple of experienced NA members visit your client to explain the NA program. To avoid confusion, it may be advisable to have your client call the phoneline him or herself.
Local service committees regularly organize panel presentations of the NA program for client groups and correctional inmates in residential facilities. These are organized by "hospitals and institutions" committees and are known within NA as "H&I panels." If you would like an H&I panel conducted for your clients, call the local NA phoneline and ask for a return call from the H&I committee chairperson to make arrangements.
Narcotics Anonymous meetings welcome visits from your client groups-in fact, our literature says that "the newcomer is the most important person at any meeting." If you would like to take a client group to visit an NA meeting, just call your local phoneline and find out when and where the nearest meeting is being held. If you are bringing a large group, you may want to ask the person answering the phoneline whether the meeting you are considering will be able to accommodate your group.
Many Narcotics Anonymous meetings are accustomed to identifying some person who will sign attendance verification cards for persons in outpatient treatment or on judicial referral. You should be aware that at some NA meetings, the person signing the card may take a special effort to emphasize to the client that this is being done as a service to the client, not because of some direct affiliation between your organization and Narcotics Anonymous. You should also be aware that in other NA meetings, it is not customary to sign attendance cards because of the local perception that doing so creates too great an appearance of affiliation between NA and other organizations. If you have any questions about this service, you should call the local NA phoneline. If the person on the line cannot answer your questions, ask them to have either an ASC (area service committee) or RSC (regional service committee) officer or the public information committee chairperson return your call.
If you have sufficient confidence that Narcotics Anonymous could be helpful for your clients, you can encourage them to ask experienced NA members-"sponsors"-to help them engage in our recovery program. All they need to do is listen carefully at NA meetings until they hear someone with whom they identify, preferably someone of their own gender. Once they've found someone, they should ask that person if they can talk further with her or him. If all seems well, they should then simply ask that person to sponsor them. The person may decline-perhaps because they are already sponsoring a number of people, perhaps because they do not feel ready for the responsibility. If they accede to the request, the sponsor will help your client work through NA's Twelve Steps and offer her or his own experience as a backdrop to the NA program; these are the only services offered by sponsors qua sponsors. Sponsors do not charge any fees for the services they render their sponsees.
Finally, probably the most important service we can offer your client is the environment of the Narcotics Anonymous group: a place where other drug addicts can offer first-hand hope of recovery to your client based on their own direct, personal experience. The NA group atmosphere is intensely social; if your client has difficulties in this area, you may want to specially prepare him or her for the first NA meeting. Once your client has made a firm connection with an NA group, usually by attending that group's meetings regularly for a number of weeks, your client will be able to count on twenty-four-hour personal support from NA contacts made in the meetings. Narcotics Anonymous members not only expect requests from newcomers for such help-they actively encourage these requests, seeing their work with new members as integral to their own recovery.