![]() ![]() "It was just this intense, horrible, wrenching pain like someone had come in with a vacuum cleaner and just sucked out every good feeling that I'd ever had in my whole life."Īfter that day, Nic says he used crystal meth constantly because he was afraid of crashing again. "I remember lying in my bed, and I was sweating the drug out of my body, and I was shaking," he says. Hours after his first hit, he came crashing down from the high. It was like everything I'd been missing my whole life, and I wanted to hold on to that feeling because it was exactly what I needed." "I just felt confident and strong and like I could do anything. "The first time I did a line of crystal, it was like my whole world changed," Nic says. Then, when Nic turned 18, he says he tried crystal methamphetamine. Drugs like acid, mushrooms, ecstasy and cocaine became the center of his son's world. Over the years, David's dreams for his son began to slip away. Nic eased his father's fears by saying he'd made a mistake, but the truth was, he was secretly smoking pot every day by the time he was in middle school. One year later, David found marijuana in his son's backpack. "When I started drinking, I couldn't stop." "The world was really abrasive and overwhelming, and I felt really hopeless," he says. When he was just 11 years old, Nic says he got drunk for the first time. "He was the captain of the water polo team."ĭespite appearances, Nic says he felt so much pain inside he went searching for something to numb his emotions. "He was almost always on the honor roll," David says. For years, David says he thought Nic was handling the difficult situation well. He grew up splitting his time between his father's home near San Francisco and his mother's home in Los Angeles. When Nic was 4 years old, his parents divorced. "He had this sort of joyfulness, this love of life," David says. ![]() David says his son had a winning personality and a golden, shining light about him. In his memoir Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines, he recounts his experiences as a teenage drug addict to the best of his recollection.Īs a little boy, Nic seemed to have it all. Using journals he kept throughout his life, Nic has also written a version of the story. "I realized the power of telling a story like this because it opens the door to other people," he says. We were so devastated that I realized that this is something we have to talk about."ĭavid delves deeper into Nic's drug abuse and its impact on their family in his book Beautiful Boy. But I still thought, like most of us, 'This could never happen to our family.' When it did, we were so blindsided. "When this hit our family, we were like so many families in this country," David says. His story generated an overwhelming response from other parents of addicts. After the article was published, David says he realized he was not alone. In 2005, one father came forward in a very public way to share what it was like to love a child whose drug and alcohol abuse threatened to tear their family apart.Īward-winning journalist David Sheff wrote about his struggle to help his son Nic overcome a crystal meth addiction in The New York Times Magazine. ![]() Addiction is a painful secret many families are too ashamed to discuss.
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