During his lifetime, he was usually referred to as "Jimmy K." due to NA's principle of personal anonymity on the public level.
This is why later on, for NA, he and the other founders would change the language of Step One of the Twelve Steps of AA from "We admitted we were powerless over ALCOHOL, that our lives had become unmanageable" to "We admitted we were powerless over OUR ADDICTION, that our lives had become unmanageable ".
Narcotics Anonymous was officially founded in July 1953 in Sun Valley, California.
There was at the time a different organization also called Narcotics Anonymous that was previously founded in the 1940s by a recovering addict named Danny Carlsen in New York City, but it was more of a social-services organization than a Twelve Step Fellowship and it did not follow the Twelve Traditions.
It was never connected to the Narcotics Anonymous Kinnon and his mates started in Sun Valley and died out in the mid-1960s.
[3] In the book "My Years with Narcotics Anonymous" Bob Stone wrote about the contribution of Jimmy: Details about the origins of today’s Narcotics Anonymous come from a variety of sources, some of which corroborate other sources while others are contradictory.
The most obvious source is the information Jimmy K. wrote in the “We Do Recover” segment of The Little White Booklet and records of group business meetings.
Most of Narcotics Anonymous early literature was written by Jimmy Kinnon and is still used worldwide today in over 70,000 NA meetings.
From 1979 to 1982 hundreds of Narcotics Anonymous members from the "new" generation of drug users of the sixties and seventies expanded on this literature and created The Basic Text.
Jimmy Kinnon, who had fought a battle against tuberculosis from the late fifties on, died of lung cancer on 9 July 1985, in California.