Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

Whatever I did was done naively and stupidly and because of my immaturity, but it doesn’t matter. I blame myself. People outside can vilify me. They can criticize me. They can blame me. Nic can. But nothing they can say or do is worse than what I do to myself every day. “You didn’t cause it.” I do not believe it.

The mirth evaporates when an extremely shy woman, who mentions her “practice,” so maybe she is a doctor or a lawyer, reveals in a fractured voice that she tried to kill herself a few days ago. She has pale, almost green, skin, no makeup, bristly hair, and eyes haunted by sleeplessness. She says that she drove to the Golden Gate Bridge and parked. S

A specialist on child development tells me that children’s brains are at their most malleable—that is, the greatest change takes place—before they are two years old and then again when they are teenagers. “The worst time for a person to be tampering with their brains is when they are teenagers,” she says. “Drugs radically alter the way teenagers’ b

At first one of us always flies with him, but at five, he begins traveling on his own. He graduates from the tiny suitcase to a canvas backpack filled with a revolving arsenal of essential stuff (books and journals, Star Trek Micro Machines, plastic vampire teeth, a Discman and CDs, a stuffed crab). A flight attendant leads him onto the plane. We s

“Addicts may have many complaints, including major and minor grievances from years past. Some of their accusations may, in fact, have truth in them. Families may well have caused pain for the addicts. They may well have failed the addicts in some significant way. (After all, what human relationship is perfect?) But addicts bring up these problems n

“For all their tears and heartache and desperately good intentions, most families of addicts are defeated in the end,” writes Beverly Conyers. “Addicts persist in their self-destructive, addictive behavior until something within themselves—something quite apart from anyone else’s efforts—changes so radically that the desire for the high is dulled a

I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it, and yet I continue to think there must be something I can do. “One moment a spark of hope gleams, the next a sea of despair rages; and always the pain, the pain, always the anguish, the same thing on and on,” wrote Tolstoy.

“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

“What is turned on here is exactly what turns on while people feel pain.” The operative word is while. She goes on, “A person stops using methamphetamine, and this is awaiting them.” Clinicians who work with meth addicts already know that addicts are often depressed, argumentative, anxious, and unwilling to engage in treatment—exactly like Nic—but