the 13th-Step, and predation on newcomers — "so desperate to escape their own…"
so desperate to escape their own interior, to lay responsibility for themselves at the feet of something as seductive and consuming as their former friend the Substance.
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.