The script below was inspired by the poem 'Drunks,' by Jack McCarthy.

We died of pneumonia, in furnished rooms where they found us three days later when somebody complained about the smell. 

We died against bridge abutments and nobody knew at the time if it was suicide or something worse.

We died in hospitals, our stomachs huge and distended and there was nothing they could do.

We died in police cells, never knowing whether we were guilty or not. 

We hung ourselves with our braces. 

We slashed our wrists so the life blood flooded away from us to give us peace at last.

We went to priests, they gave us pledges and they told us to pray, they told us to go and sin no more ,

We tried, we cried and we died.

We died of overdoses, we died in bed, and we died in straightjackets while suffering the DT's seeing creeping, slithering, shuffling things jumping out of the walls playing that awfulmusic that went on and on.

We went to doctors and they gave us stuff that would make us sick when we drank on the principle it was so crazy, it just might work. 

In despair with how to deal with us they just shook their heads and told us to not to drink so much, "try to have just a couple of beers" they might have said. 

Just give it a real try they would say.

And we tried, and still we died.

And do you know what the worst thing was? The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.

We drowned in our own vomit, or choked on it, our broken jaws wired shut. 

We died playing Russian Roulette and people thought we'd lost but we knew better. 

We died under the hooves of horses, under the wheels of vehicles, under the knives and boots of our fellow drunks.

We died in shame. And you know what was even worse? Even worse was that we couldn't believe it ourselves, that we had tried, we figured, we just thought we had tried, and we died believing that we didn't know what it meant to try.

Yes, we did try, and still we died.

When we were desperate, or hopeful, or deluded enough to go for help, we went to people with letters after their names and prayed that they might have read the right books, that had the right words in them. so they could tell us what to do, never suspecting the terrifying truth that the right words, as simple as they were, had not been written yet. They were to come.

We died with a shotgun in our mouth with the back of our head blown away, or jumping off a bridge because we couldn't take any more.

We died under the Expressway with our hands tied behind us, with a bullet in the back of the head, because this time, the people that we disappointed were the WRONG PEOPLE.

We died in convulsions with wet brains. We died incontinent and in disgrace, abandoned. 

If we were women we died degraded, because women have so much more to live up to. 

We so often died alone with nobody around at all.

And although we tried ,we still died, and nobody cried.

And the very worst thing was that for every one of us that died, there was another thousand just like us who wished that they could die but had to continue in a living hell.

We went to sleep praying we would not have to wake up because what we were enduring was intolerable and we knew in our hearts that it wasn't ever going to change.

We died of one last cigarette, the comfort of it glowing in the dark. 

We passed out, the bed caught fire and we suffocated before our body burned. 

They said "he never felt a thing, maybe it was the best thing for him really".

Except sometimes we took our family with us.

Still we tried and still we died.

Then, one day in a hospital room in New York City, one of us had what the book calls a spiritual experience, and he said to himself " this is it! I've got it, and I've got to share it". And so he began trying to give it away but we couldn't hear it.

The man in New York was so sure he had it, he tried to love us into sobriety, but that didn't work. 

Love confuses drunks.

And he tried and he tried and still we died.

There were times we got his hopes up and then we broke his heart, because you see, that's what we do. The tragedy was, that every time we thought we thought that nothing could get worse, it did get worse.

The miracle happened in June of 1935. 

It wasn't in Rome or Jerusalem or Mecca or Amritsar or even Dublin or Boston. 

It was in Akron Ohio when the man said, "I have to find a drunk because I need him as much as he needs me".

And so it happened that after thousands of years of people trying and dying alone a solution to our problem was conceived.

Now we don't go to men of the cloth, to doctors, psychiatrists and people with letters after their names, we come to people who have been there. 

We come to each other and we try.

And now, if we want to arrest this disease, we can. 

And just for today,we don't need to cry and we don't have to die...............................