My beautiful, drug-addicted boy

David Sheff recounts how he lost his son to meth and the long, agonizing struggle to get him back.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Marijuana, Memoirs, Crack, Recovery, Addiction, Heroin, Treatment, Drug Abuse, Katharine Mieszkowski, Life, Salon Conversations

March 1, 2008 |

David Sheff watched his oldest son, Nic, transform from a happy kid who loved surfing with his dad into a meth addict who stole money from his 8-year-old brother. Nic broke into his father's house so often that, eventually, David installed a burglar alarm to keep his own son at bay.

David, a longtime San Francisco Bay Area journalist, struggled for years to help his son get off drugs and stay off them, all while enduring Nic's lying, disappearances, betrayal and terrifying close calls. Nic was arrested for possession in front of his younger brother and sister. He overdosed and was revived in the emergency room. Most heartbreaking, Nic went through rehab, got clean, returned to school or work and then relapsed, only to end up strung out on the streets again.

Meanwhile, David miserably second-guessed his own role: Was his divorce from Nic's mother (sparked by his infidelity) and their long-distance joint custody arrangement a factor? Or his own youthful history of drug use, which included snorting meth? Should he have forced Nic into rehab back when he was under 18, when his drug use had seemed more like typical adolescent experimentation? As the crisis stretched on for years, with the relative calm of Nic's periods of recovery colored by the ever-present fear that he'd relapse again, David had to struggle to keep his own obsession with Nic's addiction from dominating his life and the lives of his second wife and two younger children.

In 2005, David told their story in the New York Times Magazine in a piece called "My Addicted Son." In reaction, David received hundreds of letters from readers, an outpouring of their own similar sad sagas. Now, David, 52, and Nic, 25, who has been sober for two years and three months, have written simultaneously published father-son addiction memoirs. Nic's, called "Tweak," is a book for young adults that does not spare sordid details, including how he turned to prostitution for drugs and almost lost his arm to an abscess caused by shooting up. David's book, called "Beautiful Boy," is a father's agonized tale of watching his son deteriorate and get clean, alternating between the fear of losing his child and a stubborn hope that -- maybe this time -- Nic would finally stay sober.

Salon spoke with David Sheff at our offices in San Francisco.

How did you find out that Nic had a drug problem?

We were really close, and I thought it would mean that we always would be pretty open with each other. So I was completely shocked when he was in seventh grade, and I was looking for a sweater for him, and found pot in his backpack. He was just this little boy. I had no clue. But I met with his teacher, and I talked a lot to Nic about it. I thought it was just the product of being influenced by some "bad kids," some of the darker, more precocious kids in school, who were not his normal friends.

The next time it happened was at the end of his freshman year in high school. I got a call from the school, and they found him buying pot. He was kicked out for a day and forced to go into an afternoon drug rehab program. We came in and met with the counselor and the dean, and then he seemed fine for a couple of years.

Things descended when he was a senior in high school. Now, I look back, and I see the times when he ran away, the times when he stole stuff from us and from other people, his erratic behavior, weird hours he kept, the people he was hanging out with. Anybody else in their right mind, a sane parent, would have looked at him and said: "You know, he's having trouble with drugs."

I kept explaining it away and thinking he was just rebelling a bit. Normal adolescent stuff. It wasn't until he graduated from high school, and went to Berkeley, that everything just spiraled out of control. He started using methamphetamine. Then, it was no longer a question. He was disappearing for days at a time, and when I finally found him he looked like he was ready to die. It became clear he had a problem I could no longer ignore.

Back when he was in high school, didn't counselors and psychologists affirm your view that he was going through a typical rebellion and that he would get through it?

When I brought him to therapists, and I brought him to counselors, the consistent message was that he's going to be fine: Kids do this. He's experimenting with drugs.

Nic said: "I'm not stupid. I'm not going to do anything stupid. Everybody I know smokes a little pot." And even when things escalated to the point where I was concerned, and I did go see specialists, it was always minimized.

In hindsight, do you think that, given who Nic is, the only way for him to avoid addiction was to never try drugs at all?

Like Nic, if you've got the genetic piece, and the psychological piece, and other mental health issues, your predisposition is such that any use will probably lead to problematic use. Whether it will go as haywire and out of control and dangerous as it went for Nic, that is unknowable in any particular individual.

Nic was destined for this. He was just drawn to it, even intellectually. He loved the dark stuff. Reading Bukowski and Burroughs and Henry Miller doesn't necessarily mean that a kid is going to try to emulate their debauchery to the point that Nic did, but he really was fascinated by it. For him, it was about being cool, it was about being an artist, it was about being on the edge.

Next page: "I was so scared. I was so afraid he was going to die"