AUTUMN 1999
Volume 2, issue 2
Luis Carlson, Editor
Our information phone is answered 6:15 A.M. to 9:45 P.M.
almost every day.
Tel: 408-739-7230
or 510-770-9274.
E-mail: LuisSmart@aol.com

Letters to the editor
may be addressed to:
SMART Recovery^®
P.O. Box 15431
Fremont, CA 94539

A new SMART Recovery^® meeting was recently started in Mandana CRC. See the maps pages for details.
Steve Elias, IV is the coordinator and gave the following information about himself in a recorded interview.
I got into recovery after two-thirds of my life using drugs and had complete failures at previous attempts. I was in my fourth recovery house program when I met Gail. That meeting was my motivation to keep me clean - to join in a relationship with her which is what it later became.
The 12 steps weren't going to do it for me. That program was failing miserably for me as in the past. But, once Gail and I got together and I got out of the program, I came to see that there was a better way.
Once I got completely chemical free, which takes a while, my motivations stayed the same but a chemical imbalance developed and, even though I was substance free, my behaviors were terrible. That prompted Gail to enlist a roommate who was in the recovery house with me, to give me a copy of the Rational Recovery book. Gail did some research and contacted you and got a packet of material.
In February 1998 I attended my first SR meeting and introduced myself as being my problem, not drugs or alcohol. I got to really enjoying the meetings and got into the thought that to get the maximum benefit from the program the thing to do was to get involved, as I had been told in Narcotics Anonymous. So I inquired about becoming a meeting coordinator.. In July 1998 I was taking over the Thursday meeting.
I moved to Alameda in January 1999. I saw a big void in the East Bay where there were no SMART meetings. I saw that I could save myself a hundred miles of driving, the cost of rising gas prices, and could fill some of the void by starting a group in Oakland.

a nationwide not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to provide free self-help groups to people desiring to abstain from addictive behavior. SMART is an acronym for Self^_Management And Recovery Training. SMART Recovery^® was established in 1992 and the program is based on cognitive, behavioral and educational methods of behavior change presented primarily in self-help/support groups. SMART Recovery^® also offers help by publishing and distributing various manuals and workbooks as well as a quarterly newsletter, and sponsoring an Internet discussion group and, most recently, on-line meetings. You can access online meetings by going to www.smartrecovery.org and clicking on "online meeting" or "SMART Chat". Then scroll to the bottom of that page, enter you nickname and password (the same ones you would use with your browser) and click on "Chat".

There are two advantages to you of having our newsletter e-mailed to you. First, you would get it sooner. We are amazed at how long it takes the postal service to deliver some of the newsletters. Second, if you should change location, your e-mail address stays the same and the postal service would not return the newsletter to us with an address correction or some other "undeliverable" indication. The advantage for us is that we would not be paying eighty-three cents for every newsletter not delivered. Just e-mail your name as it appears on this newsletter and you e-mail address to

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