Who Holds the Password

A meeting that only lets in people its members already know has started refusing the very drinker the Long Form says it may not refuse. It begins with a real problem. An online meeting gets disrupted twice, strangers shouting into the screen. The group votes for a waiting room and a password, sent by a member to anyone who asks. Months later, the password only travels between friends, and the host lets in the names they recognise. Nobody voted to close the door. It closed by habit. Meanwhile the drinker who found the link at two in the morning sits in a waiting room nobody checks. The Long Form (Big Book, p. 563): "Our membership ought to include all who suffer from alcoholism. Hence we may refuse none who wish to recover." Bill W. put the groups' side of it in 1946 (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 14): "We do not wish to deny anyone his chance to recover from alcoholism." The password was meant to stop the people who wreck meetings. It ended up stopping the people meetings are for. A door that only friends can open is a private party, however good the reason it was locked. Test it tonight: find out how a drinker who knows nobody in your group would get into your next meeting, and try it the way he would.