"Beautiful Boy" Response 1: Addiction

"When my child was born, it was impossible to imagine that he would suffer in the ways that Nic has suffered. Parents want only good things for their children. I was a typical parent who felt that this could not happen to us-not my son."  (16) The author of the book, Beautiful Boy, David Sheff struggles throughout the book to deal with just this- that addiction can happen to anyone. No one, despite race, religion, location, or any other societal factor, is invincible to addiction. "Addiction is an equal-opportunity affliction- affecting people without regard to their economic circumstance, their education, their race, their geography, their IQ, or any other factor." (178) That is the scary part of addiction, because it is in each person's hands whether or not they avoid addiction. As a parent, Sheff describes how difficult this is because you just have to hope that your child will make good choices. Through Sheff's eyes, I was able to see Nic's downfall and ultimate addiction to methamphetimine and how much he struggled to overcome this addiction. Many people refer to drug addiction as a disease, and ultimately it is. But what is so difficult to understand when your family member is an addict, is that it is a disease that they did to themselves. "People with cancer or emphysema or heart disease don't lie and steal. Someone dying of those diseases would do anything in their power to live. But here's the rub of addiction. By its nature, people afflicted are unable to do what, from the outside, appears to be a simple solution- don't drink. Don't use drugs. In exchange for that one small sacrifce, you will be given a gift that other terminally ill people would give anything for: life." (178) This book taught me a lot about addiction, a topic that I thought I knew a lot about already. In the ways that Sheff described it though, I was able to see how horrible of a disease it truly is. It will kill them, they can stop it, and a lot of the time don't see this until it's too late. Drug addiction clouds their minds, impairing them from deciding that they want to live in exchange for doing drugs.