the 13th-Step, and predation on newcomers
In Boston AA, newcomer-seducing is called 13th-Stepping and is regarded as the province of true bottom-feeders. It’s predation.
Context
The doctrine that indicts Gately's own bedside fantasy: seducing a newcomer is 13th-Stepping, near-rape, because the newly clean arrive desperate to escape their own interior and hand themselves to something consuming — and a person can be that something exactly the way the Substance was. The insight underneath the ethic is the theme's whole account of the disease: the drive is not to a drug but to self-abdication, and any object seductive enough will serve.