Salvation for Some Jittery Souls : Recovery: Caffeine addicts finally have a place to share their struggle: a 12-step program for coffee junkies. It’s in Portland--naturally.

Mike M. is a user, an addict, a lean, fidgety man in a gray tweedsuit who struggles every day to stay straight.

That’s particularly hard around here because on every street corner all over this town, his drug of choice is being sold in heart-pounding, high-grade doses. The monkey is everywhere, calling Mike’s name.

“The thing is, I have a short memory. I forget how bad the stuff makes me feel,” Mike is saying, his hands jammed into the pockets of a long black overcoat, looking around at the other addicts in the room, the ones who come to the St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church library in downtown Portland every Friday night to help each other resist temptation. “I’ll manage to stay off it for a while and then I’ll get around people who go, ‘Come on, it’s no big deal. It’s just a cup of coffee.’ ”

Not for Mike, it isn’t. And not for the four others attending this meeting of Caffeine Anonymous, the first 12-step coffee-addiction support group in the nation. They have met here every week since last spring, half a dozen jittery souls railing against the ruthless coffee demons who make them cranky, irritate their bladders and won’t let them sleep at night.

“Step One,” Mike says, reading from an adapted 12-step list, “is to admit that we are powerless over caffeine and that our lives have become unmanageable.”

So unmanageable, Mike says, that he was having panic attacks, sleepless nights and, whenever he tries to quit, withdrawal headaches that can last up to a week.

“I can’t just drink one cup,” he says, “ ‘cause it makes me want more, then I get on a spin and it’s over. Decaf is no good either, ‘cause it just makes me want the real thing.”

“You know what I realized?” says Courtney, who like most members of the group has been unable to stay caffeine-free for more than a few days at a time. “When I drink coffee, it’s just like drinking a cup of unhappiness.”

It’s hardly a surprise that this would happen in the Pacific Northwest, America’s caffeine corner, a region so obsessed with espresso that hot foamy cups of the stuff--cappuccinos, lattes, mochas and macchiatos--are available not just at coffee bars and restaurants, but in gas stations, grocery stores, drive-through “Motor Mokas” and high school foyers. Around here no one orders mere coffee. Even grade-school kids ask for a “double-tall, skinny latte with an al-

mond Torani shot” and know exactly what they’re talking about.

This is what Starbucks hath wrought: hopped-up java heads walking through the rain with their tanker-sized personalized mugs, debating the merits of Arabica blends versus Jamaican Blue Mountain, their heart rates moving at hummingbird speed, unable to go for more than a block or two without stopping for a refill.

“Coffee as compensation is a real theme around here. It’s like having a little campfire on a cold, rainy, gray day,” says Jim Roberts, president and co-founder of the Coffee People, a 16-store chain of Portland-area espresso bars (including an Immediate Care Center two blocks from Good Samaritan Hospital) offering everything from Cafe au Lait to hyper-caffeinated Triple Black Tiger Mindsweepers.

For Marsha Naegeli-Moody, a former Mrs. Oregon and owner of a Portland court reporting service, coffee had gone way past the point of compensation.

“It was my last vice,” she says now, admitting that she was, at her most strung out, a double-espresso junkie with a 10-cup-a-day habit. For 10 years she tried fighting the addiction on her own, unable to find the willpower, or the peer support, to get herself decaffeinated.

“Finally, last spring, I said to myself there’s got to be other people out there feeling this way, who want to quit but can’t, who give up coffee and find out they have headaches, they’re nauseated, they’re depressed. I can’t be the only one.”

So she posted flyers at stores, restaurants and Alcoholic Anonymous meeting places.

“Are you tired of being addicted to caffeine and having to drink it every day?” the flyers read. Mike M., a drug counselor and recovering alcoholic, was the first to respond, and together they formed the charter group of Caffeine Anonymous last April.

“The problem is that a lot of people don’t take this seriously yet. There’s no stigma,” says Naegeli-Moody, who admits that she still serves coffee in her office and that her husband still has to have a cup first thing every morning. “But it’s just like nicotine was 20 or 30 years ago. This is a substance that gets you hooked and simply isn’t good for you.”

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Naegeli-Moody’s cause got a boost last October from a Johns Hopkins University study confirming that caffeine is indeed an addictive substance that can be connected to stress, anxiety and depression. And even Roberts of Coffee People admits that some people might be better off with less of his product.

“It’s like alcohol or fire or nuclear radiation,” he says. “It’s one of those Promethean substances with a good side and a dark side. You can’t just use it thoughtlessly. It’s got real power to it.”

While Roberts has nothing but encouraging words for Caffeine Anonymous, others in the gourmet coffee industry aren’t so kind. Ward Barbee publishes a Portland-based coffee magazine called Fresh Cup, which writes about trends in the specialty coffee business and carries lots of ads for high-priced espresso makers such as the Dolcevita M50 and the Espressimo 2400 (a product of the Grindmaster Corp.).

Barbee recently wrote a scathing editorial about Caffeine Anonymous that began, “Will the idiocy never end?” and went on to say, “It sounds like Marsha Naegeli-Moody has a few more problems than caffeine. Do I smell publicity here?”

“I just don’t think it’s a story,” Barbee says in his tiny office in Portland’s warehouse district, an espresso machine gurgling in the other room. “I’m sure there are people addicted to caffeine just like they’re addicted to gambling and driving fast. But is it really that serious a problem?”

The folks at St. Stephen’s certainly think so. They share their stories for an hour or so each week, hold each other’s hands and offer prayers of hope.

“I get tired and I give in and then, as soon as I start drinking again, I can feel my confidence ebbing, like this river at my feet,” Courtney is saying, her head down, her voice shaky.

“I think a lot of us have given up so much: junk food, alcohol, tobacco,” Naegeli-Moody says. “And caffeine is our last holdout. Most everyone I know starts their day with a cup of coffee. Everyone. It’s like it’s in the blood of America.

“That’s why so many people don’t want to face up to this problem. It’s like they’re saying, “No, don’t take that away from us too.’ ”