Recovery Without AA: SOS Founder Sober 25 Years April 24, 2003 marks a quarter century of personal freedom from active alcohol addiction for SOS founder Jim Christopher. "SOS (Secular Organizations for Sobriety / Save Our Selves) is a friendly self-empowerment alternative to AA's spiritual 12-step support groups," said Christopher. "Although early SOS members, including myself, initially met with rather mean-spirited reactions from individual AA members," Christopher continued, "that's par for the course when you create something new; for instance in 1986, soon after SOS was founded, I was leaving the parking lot of a Los Angeles radio station, after having presented SOS on a live phone-in talk show, when one of the station producers blocked my exit with her car and emerged screaming that AA had saved her life and how dare we offer something else."  Through the years—in spite of opposition—a global movement has grown into providing free, anonymous, self-empowerment support group meetings for thousands of individuals worldwide. The secular option that SOS provides has been more widely utilized as a referral to persons in addiction recovery owing to numerous U.S. court decisions ruling AA to be religious in nature. As a result hundreds of SOS meetings are now in place in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and other correctional institutions, as well as other government- funded addiction recovery facilities. Christopher plans to celebrate his 25th sobriety anniversary at numerous SOS meetings in the Los Angeles area.