March 13th, 2020

Recently, the COVID-19 (commonly referred to as coronavirus) pandemic has prompted many of our beloved Heroin Anonymous meetings to be cancelled. Our members deserve a safe environment in which to share their experience. Here, we make a few suggestions that we hope will help groups continue to operate through this difficult time.

As we do not claim medical expertise as a whole, we urge you to seek guidance from the state and federal agencies whose purpose it is to provide such information. In the United States, these may include the Center for Disease Control and local hospital hotlines.

Some of our groups have begun practices that other groups might use as an example. For instance, various meetings have suggested against physical interactions (e.g. hugging or holding hands), and encouraging individuals to distance themselves from others in the room as much as possible.

Additionally, since many meeting spaces have been closed, many of our members have looked to holding online meetings. While Heroin Anonymous does not currently provide guidance on such things, various platforms for this are available such as Skype and Google Meet. If you are interested in learning more about this, we are happy to point you in the direction of a member who has such experience.

Finally, if your meeting is listed on heroinanonymous.org but is cancelled, we encourage you to contact our webmaster at hawswebmaster@gmail.com and request that a cancellation notice be posted until the meeting resumes.

We hope these suggestions are helpful and we wish you the best.

Sincerely,

The Heroin Anonymous World Services board of directors