Staying Fit
Okay, so Nic Sheff's parents got divorced. And Nic lives some of the year with his remarried father and two step-sibs near San Francisco, and some of the year with his remarried mother in Los Angeles. Sure, he’s tried drugs—he’s a teenager, and about half of all American kids will try drugs. But that mostly means marijuana. No way he's going to do heroin. Unlikely he’ll try cocaine. And as for methamphetamines—never.
Why not meth? Because everybody knows that meth is the most addictive, demeaning substance ever created, a drug that takes responsible, successful citizens and turns them, with astonishing speed, into grotesque creatures with rotted teeth, wild eyes, and concentration camp bodies. David Sheff suggests that 12 million Americans have tried meth and that 1.5 million are addicted to it. Inexplicably, one of them was his son, by every measure a smart, witty, ambitious kid. Who would later say that meth was what he’d been looking for his whole life.
David Sheff, like many boomer parents, is on weak ground as a role model when it comes to drugs. Back in the day, he tried “marijuana, Quaaludes, Jack Daniels, Jose Cuervo, cocaine, and random uppers and downers.” I’m about his age, so I know firsthand of those substances. If I—or, I’m sure, David Sheff —had been looking down the barrel of addiction, we would have sobered up, and fast.
But Nic plummets into drugs. And no one knows what to do. His therapist’s advice: Don’t ban drugs from the house, he’ll just take them somewhere else. But now Nic is stealing from his family for drug money. He gets arrested. What would you do? I know a mother of four sons who, as they were growing up, cautioned them: “You will be someone’s bitch in jail before I bail you out.” (Her sons have an unblemished record.) Not David Sheff. He bails his son out.
Nic steals an old family car and disappears for almost two weeks. His father weeps “in a way that I have not wept since I was a young boy.” It is time— it is past time—for rehab.