Meth addiction

As usual, my Sunday afternoon was spent perusing the New York Times Magazine - this week it has a feature by David Sheff on his struggle with his son Nick's meth addiction (registration required). Most striking was how much meth just took over Nick's life:

At the University of California at Berkeley, Nick almost immediately began dealing to pay for his escalating meth habit. After three months, he dropped out, claiming that he had to pull himself together. I encouraged him to check into a drug-rehabilitation facility, but he refused. (He was over 18, and I could not commit him.) He disappeared. When he finally called after a week, his voice trembled. It nonetheless brought a wave of relief - he was alive. I drove to meet him in a weedy and garbage-strewn alleyway in San Rafael. My son, the svelte and muscular swimmer, water-polo player and surfer with an ebullient smile, was bruised, sallow, skin and bone, and his eyes were vacant black holes. Ill and rambling, he spent the next three days curled up in bed

Meth seems like a truly all-consuming drug. Recently, OregonLive.com had a visually shocking photo feature on the "Faces of Meth" - the drug really seems to eat at people from the inside, aging them at 10 times the normal rate.

The following passage also struck me:

[Nick's] heroes, including Holden Caulfield and Atticus Finch, were replaced by an assortment of misanthropes, addicts, drunks, depressives and suicides, role models like Burroughs, Bukowski, Cobain, Hemingway and Basquiat. Other children watched Disney and ''Star Wars,'' but Nick preferred Scorsese, David Lynch and Godard.

Wow, that could be my own teenage heroes list. Not that that's unusual - if you're a film buff, chances are you're into Scorsese, Lynch, and Godard as well; if you grew up in the early 90s, chances are you idolised Cobain at some point.