Helplessness to hope: my war with chemical, and other, weapons of destruction.

I was born in a small city in upstate New York and became a teenager in the expanded ether of suburban America in the mid-1970s. I got willfully, deliberately drunk for the first time when I was 14. I smoked marijuana soon after. The leftover lethargy of the previous decade's hippie ethic permeated the social fabric, and drugs were everywhere. Prevailing teenage wisdom suggested hard drugs (we called them "chemicals") should be avoided, and a common authority-figure theme maintained that marijuana led to the se of these harder drugs. I mocked this theory with the arrogance that only a 14-year-old can have, then lived to prove it out just as soon as I could.

The notions of mind expansion and enlightenment were laughable Aquarian shibboleths, and my sole purpose in using drugs was to get as high as I could possibly manage.

I dropped my first hit of acid shortly after enrolling in high school. I loved it. Then I took my first barbiturates. I loved them, too. I smoked pot incessantly. I smoked hashish when it was available. I discovered the joys of distilled spirits.

I loved them all.

My unusually keen interest in sports waned. I watched a minimum of six hours of television a day. Always a bright student, my performance in school became anemic. I couldn't be bothered with homework. Doing well in school was for nerds (or as we called them: "glugs"). My friends were juvenile delinquents, hoodlums and dropouts. I admired them.

I was arrested for burglary before my 15th birthday.

I was hanging around in bars long before I reached the legal age, at the time, of 18. These places were lax about obtaining proper identification (and why would they? They would have eliminated half their patrons). This was how I developed the habit of drinking whiskey.

The world I associated with the barroom was right out of an adman's fantasy: glamour, sophistication, charm and personal attractiveness. I drank only the finest scotch because that's what my father drank, and also because I wanted to appear more experienced, more legitimate to anyone who was suspicious about my age.

I became quite the bon vivant in my late teens and early twenties, bustling around this upstate podunk, drinking expensive whiskey and making trips to the parking lot to smoke marijuana and sniff cocaine.

My life continued on this track for the next 13 years or so. I went to college. I lived in Paris for nearly a year. I moved to New York City. Things happened: I worked a succession of jobs; I had girlfriends (and got dumped by them); I switched apartments (frequently). But nothing really changed. My descent was gradual and steady. By the time I was 33, I was a daily user of heroin (a nasty habit I picked up), cocaine, alcohol (still quite the young sophisticate, with my fine whiskey), marijuana and, if I could help it, a pill or two to make me sleep.

I was holding down a crummy bartending job. I lived in somebody else's apartment, in a room that measured six by nine, and sleeping on a box spring. The contents of two cardboard boxes represented the bulk of my worldly possessions.

The digital alarm clock next to me claimed it was six o'clock. But for the life of me, I couldn't recall if it was a.m. or p.m. It wasn't as if any light dared to creep in and offer me a clue. I stared up at the ceiling. It seemed as if I had just opened my eyes and ten years had gone by. I asked myself, "How did I get there?"

It was that fearsome moment of clarity that recovering drunks and dope fiends refer to as "hitting bottom". I was convinced that my life could not get any worse, that I had sunk as low as I could, and that I needed to change my way of living.

The irony is, it was so undramatic. Nothing tragic occurred. I realized, if I was to be honest with myself, that I had suffered through worse episodes in my drinking and drugging career, had hit lower bottoms, if you will. I can't even explain why this happened to be the moment I admitted to myself that my abuse of alcohol and drugs were directly related to the reason I was nowhere in life.

Like a lot of other people ignorant of the work being done in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), I was prejudiced. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in a church basement and have somebody else tell me how it was. That nonsense was for weaklings and losers. Except, now I was so beaten down I was forced to ignore my pride. I had nowhere else to go.

To my great fortune, the people I met at AA meetings all admitted similar prejudices before embarking upon this new way of life. I discovered that my negative attitudes were rooted in fear, in ignorance and in arrogance. I also learned that most of my thinking up to that point was also based on fear, and it was fear that propelled me to drink and drug (in contemporary slang, I was a "garbage head") with such a vindictive sense of purpose, and it was this fear and this dependence that had led me to failure.

In some corners, AA may be perceived as a cult, as a mysterious knot of religious kooks, or as an organization of self-righteous zealots. It is none of these. I don't have the space here to outline the AA programme of recovery - the "Twelve Steps". Nor do I feel it is my purpose. I am not an AA spokesman and I am not being paid for this work I speak only for myself, sharing only my personal experience.

Anyone with a genuine interest in this fellowship of men and women, whose primary purpose is to help one another stay sober while reaching out to the alcoholic who still suffers, is strongly urged to read the book Alcoholics Anonymous. It was from this volume that the organization took its name. Any further investigation can be done at "open" AA meetings, where people who do not believe they have a problem with alcohol are welcome to come and listen to recovering alcoholics tell their stories.

You will find that we indeed come from every level of society. Some of us landed on skid row, and some of us occupied the presidential suite, but we all drank alcoholically, and many of us abused other drugs.

I like to say that since I became an AA member, my life has been like a line on a graph that points straight up. That is an exaggeration. Nobody gets sober and drug-free overnight, and nobody gets sober and drug-free gracefully I started attending meetings regularly in September 1993, but it took several months before I was able to let go - absolutely and completely give myself to this simple programme.

Twenty years of pathology cannot be reversed all at once, and I realize I have a period of reconstruction ahead. But it is not an exaggeration to say that I am happier than I have ever been. I am genuinely close with my friends and my family. I would be remiss if I did not say that today I have God in my life, and that this is about the single most important fact of my existence.

It's not as if I don't have problems. After all, life does go on, whether you're drunk or sober. But today I am able to treat these problems as challenges, and meet my responsibilities on a daily basis instead of cowering from them with a drink or cocaine. I am cheerful (most of the time), optimistic and full of hope for a meaningful productive life.

Fact: Young people can be particularly vulnerable to acute alcohol effects because of their lower tolerance, their lack of experience with drinking and their more hazardous patterns of drinking, including episodic drinking in high-risk situations.

Peter P. is a novelist and recovering addict and alcoholic living in New York City. He contributed this article at the request of the Chronicle.