NA HISTORY

The NA fellowship as it is known today was founded in Sun Valley in the Los Angeles area of California in July 1953. Its principles had been first applied to drug addiction at the US Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky in 1947. The following year, in 1948, meetings were organised in New York City by an ex-addict familiar with the Lexington programme but these groups did not last.

The present NA fellowship was formed by a group of addicts who had been attending regular AA meetings in Sun Valley. They had seen the benefits of the AA programme to recovering alcoholics and decided to set up a similar group for addicts. The first meetings were fairly sporadic and were mainly restricted to California. Over the next few years NA grew very slowly. In the 1980s there was an explosive growth in NA meetings world-wide. There are currently estimated to be 70,000 weekly meetings in 144 countries worldwide as of May 2018.