Recently, there was a gruesome article in the newspaper about a woman's torso that had been found in a Dumpster. It turns out that her likely murderer was a co-worker of someone I know and I was given the inside story: the victim was a crackhead who was involved in a relationship with the accused. When his money ran out, she ran out on him, and likely out of jealousy, maybe even by accident, he killed her and then dismembered her body. In telling the story, "crackhead" was used freely to describe the victim, and there is just the slightest implication that she ended up the way that crackheads do; that it was perhaps inevitable; foregone. Once her remains were identified, her family released a picture to the newspaper of the victim as a fresh-faced 15 year old, apparently the last picture they have of her before she became an addict and unrecognizable to them. Fifteen. And murdered at twenty-four. I don't know this family, but I can imagine they did everything they could to get between their daughter and her addiction, but crack, like meth or heroin or whatever I've never even heard of, is one of those drugs that can hook some users nearly instantly (or so I've been told). As the mother of teenage daughters, this young woman's death scared me and I totally empathized with her family; there but for the grace of God…
I also recently started watching Breaking Bad, and although I have been silently cheering on this terminally ill high school teacher who is just cooking up some meth to set his family up financially before he dies, perhaps I should be recognizing him for the villain that he really is.
These two influences led me to listen to the memoir Beautiful Boy A Father's Journey through His Son's Meth Addiction by David Sheff. The author paints his son's childhood as happy and fulfilling, perhaps glossing over the traumatic effects of the breakup of his marriage to the boy's mother. Although Sheff had once caught his son with a small amount of pot, he thought of it as normal experimentation, and Nic went on to become a Varsity athlete in high school, an honour student, an award-winning journalist, and by all accounts a bright and engaged kid. By the end of his senior year, however, Nic had become chronically tardy and absent and, as is discovered later, had been abusing drugs and alcohol. This led, ultimately, to a meth addiction, dropping out of college, rehab, relapse, more rehab, another relapse…The story is horrifying in the sense that if it could happen in this family, maybe it could happen in any family… In mine? Is it possible to prevent your children from trying meth (or crack or heroin or…)? Is it possible to predict if your children would be among those unfortunate experimenters who go on to become addicts?
As a journalist, Sheff dealt with the helplessness of his situation by educating himself on meth addiction through research and interviewing leading experts. The information he intersperses into the memoir was fascinating to me, and ultimately, discouraging: meth is a widely available and particularly addictive drug that traditional rehab has very little efficacy in dealing with. Not only that, but Sheff cites research that proves that drug dealers are lacing less serious drugs (ecstasy and pot) with meth. Is that true? Is it happening here?
I know that here in Canada there is growing support for the legalization of marijuana, and to the extent that it would ensure that my kids don't get criminal records for one day trying a so-called "soft drug", I can get behind it. If it gets pot out of the hands of criminals who might taint it with meth, then the safe supply argument gets me even further behind it. But then Sheff explains that pot is indeed a gateway drug: not everyone who smokes pot will end up trying meth but, he says, everyone who becomes a meth addict started out smoking pot. What can a parent do with that information?
This memoir is well written and interesting and had me rooting for the whole family to come out safely on the other side of addiction. As Sheff learns in Al-Anon, the families of addicts need to remember the three C's: the families didn't cause the addiction; they can't control the addiction; they can't cure the addiction. I understand and believe those words but what I was hoping to learn was: can families prevent an addiction? Probably not.
I understand that Nic Sheff, the addict at the center of this father's memoir, has written his own account of life as a meth addict and I'll be listening to that next, looking for another piece of the puzzle.
