Beautiful Boy is a novel by David Sheff about his experience dealing with his son’s (Nic) addiction to crystal methamphetamine. It truly is heartbreaking, and I can’t imagine what it is like to be a parent and have your child go through something like this. The way he describes his torment is incredible, and the book would certainly be helpful for other parents going through the same crisis.
The novel starts off describing Nic’s birth and his childhood. It goes through his early experimentation with alcohol and cannabis, until it finally reaches the point where he tried methamphetamine. From that point on, it was a downward spiral of theft, deceit, drop-outs, rehab visits, and pure terror and suffering. Addiction affects much, much more than the addict. It affects their families tremendously, and the aggregate cost of addiction is devastating for the economy. Ironically, one of the drugs Nic first tried, cannabis, can probably greatly alleviate his addiction to other drugs. Smoked cannabis has some medicinal properties, but a concentrated cannabis extract known as hemp oil can cure essentially any disease, by working within one’s endocannabinoid system. It has worked to cure other mental disorders, and since addiction is at its base a brain disorder, I am positive hemp oil could cure that too.
I enjoyed reading it, and now I have moved on to his son’s book, Tweak. I will review that after I have finished it, but already it is much more intense and descriptive than his father’s. David Sheff can only write from his perspective, but the perspective of the addict himself is extensively revealing.
