High: Everything You Want to Know About Drugs, Alcohol, and Addiction

By David Sheff and Nic Sheff

Just Say Know! With drug education for children more important than ever, this nonfiction book draws on the experiences of the NY Times bestselling father/son team of David and Nic Sheff to provide all the information teens and tweens need to know about drugs, alcohol, and addiction.

From David Sheff, author of Beautiful Boy (2008), and Nic Sheff, author of Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines (2008), comes the ultimate resource for learning about the realities of drugs and alcohol for middle grade readers.
     This book tells it as it is, with testimonials from peers who have been there and families who have lived through the addiction of a loved one, along with the cold, hard facts about what drugs and alcohol do to our bodies. From how to navigate peer pressure to outlets for stress to the potential consequences for experimenting, Nic and David Sheff lay out the facts so that middle grade readers can educate themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781328530608

David Sheff

DAVID SHEFF is the author of several books, including the #1 New York Times best-selling memoir Beautiful Boy. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Wired, and many other publications. His ongoing research and reporting on the science of addiction earned him a place on Time magazine's list of the World's Most Influential People. Sheff and his family live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit David at DavidSheff.com, and on Twitter @david_sheff.  

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Authors’ Note

Copyright

Dedication

One Hit, One Drink

Nic’s Story and Why We Wrote This Book

America on Drugs

Choosing to Use

Your Brain on Drugs

Keeping Sane

Just Say Know

Alcohol: Just One Drink

Marijuana: Hits And Myths

Chapter Eight: Pain Pills and Other Prescription Drugs

Heroin, Cocaine, Meth, and Other Illegal Drugs

Addiction

Use, Abuse, and Addiction

Addiction Is a Family Problem

Chapter Twelve: Drug-Free: Treatment, Relapse, and Recovery

Afterword

Father and Son: A Conversation

Appendix 1: Addictionary

Appendix 2: Resources

Appendix 3: Helpful Books

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index

Also Available by David Sheff

About the Authors

Connect with HMH on Social Media

Authors’ Note

Over the years we researched High, many people shared their stories. Some spoke under the condition that we use only their first names or pseudonyms. We’re deeply grateful to all of them, named or not, for their willingness to speak to us and their desire to help others. Similarly, we report on visits to treatment programs that allowed us onto the premises only under the condition that neither they nor their patients be identified. Several passages in High are reprinted from Clean by David Sheff (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Copyright © 2019 by David Sheff and Nic Sheff

All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Illustrations © 2019 by Victor Ochoa

Cover design and illustration by Lisa Vega

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Names: Sheff, David, author. | Sheff, Nic, author.

Title: High : everything you want to know about drugs, alcohol, and addiction / by David Sheff and Nic Sheff. Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2018]

Identifiers: LCCN 2017061507 (print) | LCCN 2018002129 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Drug abuse—Juvenile literature. | Drug abuse—Treatment—Juvenile literature. | Substance abuse—Juvenile literature. | Substance abuse—Treatment—Juvenile literature. Classification: LCC HV5809.5 (ebook) | LCC HV5809.5 .S435 2018 (print) | DDC 616.86—dc23 | LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061507

ISBN: 978-0-544-64434-2 hardcover

ISBN: 978-0-358-24433-2 paperback

eISBN 978-1-328-53060-8

v2.0220

This book includes information about a variety of topics related to the treatment and prevention of addiction and the treatment of mental illness. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended to replace the services of a trained professional. All matters regarding the diagnosis and treatment of addiction and mental illness require medical supervision. This book does not endorse or recommend any specific treatment program or facility. The author and publisher disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects resulting directly or indirectly from information contained in this book.

This book is dedicated to you—whoever’s struggling with growing up, which means just about everyone.

Part 1

One Hit, One Drink

· · · · · ·

Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it. —PROFESSOR DUMBLEDORE TO HARRY POTTER IN HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE BY J. K. ROWLING

CHAPTER ONE

Nic’s Story and Why We Wrote This Book

When you’re an addict, you can go without feeling anything except drunk or stoned or hungry. Still, when you compare this to other feelings—to sadness, anger, fear, worry, despair, and depression, well, an addiction no longer looks so bad. It looks like a very viable option.

—CHUCK PALAHNIUK

BEEN THERE. DONE THAT.

When I was growing up in San Francisco, it felt like everyone smoked pot. They smoked it walking down the street. They smoked it at school. Some of my parents’ friends even smoked. So when I was twelve and one of my friends offered to smoke me out, it felt like no big deal.

We walked down to the park behind the soccer field. My friend passed the pipe to me, and I hit it without really thinking. Almost instantly—pretty much as soon as the drug hit me—I felt a sense of relief.

I think that relief came because pot helped blunt a feeling I’d had my whole life that something was wrong with me. On the outside, everything looked good. I was popular and did well in school. But inside, I was scared and insecure and totally uncomfortable in my own skin. I walked through life like I wore my nerves on the outside of my body. Everything was too much to handle, and the world seemed overwhelming and abrasive. I’d look in the mirror, and the image looking back struck me as ugly, weak, and pathetic.

Smoking pot changed that. When I smoked, I felt confident and strong. I could slip out of my bubble of insecurity and go to parties, talk to girls. Pot helped me see a different person in the mirror. It helped me turn off the negative voices in my head, stop worrying, and just have fun.

Pot made me feel free—at first. But soon it began to have the opposite effect. It stopped giving me that confidence. Stopped making me feel light and fun and strong. The more pot I smoked, the harder it became to catch hold of those positive sensations, and the more depressed I got when I was straight.

I’d heard all those warnings about pot affecting brain development and all that, but I thought it was a scare tactic. But looking back, I realized I spent so much of high school and college high, that I missed a lot of what normally happens during those years. It’s when I should have learned how to adapt to change, how to handle difficult emotions, how to fail, be rejected, deal with all the normal pressures of adolescent life.

Because I was always smoking pot, I never faced any of those things. I never learned how to be a real, functioning person, how to just cope. When things got too intense, I got high to escape. And when I wasn’t high, I was so deeply depressed I couldn’t even get out of bed.

Eventually, no matter how much pot I smoked, it basically stopped affecting me at all. It didn’t take away the pain and fear like it once had. It just made me dull and paranoid.

RUNNING FROM MYSELF

At that point, I decided to seek out harder drugs. And it was definitely a conscious choice. I was desperate to find something that gave me the same sense of relief pot had once given me. I felt like I couldn’t exist without drugs.

I tried everything—hallucinogens, prescription drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin, ecstasy, cocaine. I kept chasing that more confident and strong version of myself who felt less alone. Sometimes the drugs would work for a while, but then the feeling would slip away again. It wasn’t until I tried crystal meth that I thought I’d finally found the one.

Now, thanks mostly to Breaking Bad—a TV show about a high school chemistry teacher who became a meth cook—everybody’s heard of crystal meth and knows how dangerous it is. But back in the late nineties, when I first did it, I had never heard of it. So, when my friend offered me some speed (also known as meth), I took it without thinking.

As soon as that drug hit me, I felt a rush of elation—not just from the drug, but from feeling like this was what I’d been looking for my whole life. It was better than those first hits of pot, better than everything. I felt super confident, super strong. I felt like a real-life superhero. Just like that, I was addicted.

Once I started doing crystal meth, my life spiraled out of control in a flash. Meth made me arrogant, crazy, and fixated on more, more, more. I was like an animal, reduced to one need: to get high. Nothing else mattered. I broke in to houses, stole money. I even stole from my little brother’s piggy bank.

My parents kicked me out of the house. I ended up homeless, living in a park in San Francisco. I ate out of garbage cans, got food from soup kitchens. I did things I’d never imagined doing to get money. And I kept using. I couldn’t stop.

Until I had a really bad scare. I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat, having been on life support after an overdose. Terrified, I went into rehab and managed to stay sober for a year and a half.

Only, I had never learned how to live sober. I was a complete emotional mess. The one thing that maybe saved my life is that I wrote. I come from a family of writers and have written ever since I was little. Even strung out and living on the streets, I wrote. I’d cram into the back of some burned-out car with other kids and stay up all night, writing in my notebook while they slept, trying to get my story down, to make sense of the chaos of my life.

I wrote when I was sober, too, and miraculously, I connected with this editor at a publishing house who felt I had a story to tell. I’d write chapters, and she’d like them and ask for more. Eventually, I got a book deal.

At the time, it felt to me that writing a book would make my whole life worthwhile. So I finished about half of it, and I received a small chunk of money that felt like a huge chunk of money. I felt on top of things for the first time in forever.

IT ALL FALLS APART

I’d been sober for about eighteen months when I got involved with this older woman I’d known from being in treatment with her. She was super beautiful and super cool, the ex-wife of a famous actor. I felt that if she could love and want me, it had to mean I was worth something.

My entire identity became wrapped up in my book and in my girlfriend. Of course, it turned out she was using again and lying to everyone about being sober. She smoked crack, so I started smoking crack too. I felt like I had to, so we could be together. Like it had to be the two of us, sharing this secret little world. It became the only thing that mattered to me.

That led me down a dark hole into the worst drug binge of my life. We started doing not just crack, but heroin and meth, too. I kept having convulsions from smoking so much coke. Even when I almost lost my arm from an abscess caused by shooting drugs, I kept using. I couldn’t stop.

The meth made us both crazy. Once, I went into the bathroom to find her ripping out the tiles, convinced I’d somehow hidden drugs there. She’d tear apart the lining of her clothes and bags, thinking she’d find the stash I must have sewn into the fabric, even though I’d never sewn a stitch in my life. It got worse and worse, more insane and brutal, until she flat-out attacked me one night. And still we kept at it.

I was sick as hell, and my body started to shut down. My insides felt like cement. I’d have to sit in the bathroom for hours, trying to get it out. I could feel the poison inside me, but I kept trying to ignore it.

And I kept trying to write. I had this absurd fantasy that I’d finish my book and my girlfriend and I would get clean. Somehow, I convinced myself that finishing the book would magically bring about a happy ending.

I’d stay up writing for days at a time. Then I’d send pages to my editor. Of course, she’d write back and say, Nic, these pages make no sense. You need to get help.

But I didn’t listen.

REHAB OR JAIL

One night, I got this crazy idea to take apart my computer and my cell phone so I could combine them into some kind of miraculous invention. Of course, I couldn’t put them back together (if I had, I’d be a billionaire by now, because I’d pretty much have invented the iPhone). I freaked out, because without a computer, I couldn’t write my book. And without my book, I couldn’t make my dreams come true.

I knew that my mom, who also lived in LA, kept an old computer in her garage. So I drove over to the Pacific Palisades with my girlfriend, and I dropped her at the Ralphs grocery store there. I probably said something like Wait here. I’m gonna go steal this computer. I’ll be right back.

And then I drove to my mom’s house and broke in to her garage.

It was six a.m.

The rest is still kind of a blank.

I must have gone into some drug-fueled psychosis. Suddenly, I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the garage. I felt caged in, and I panicked. I thought I heard people talking outside and ended up climbing up into the rafters and trying to tear away the shingles so I could escape onto the roof.

Eventually, my girlfriend started calling everyone to look for me—including my mom, who came out and found me. It turned out I’d been there for about five hours, having a complete meltdown. Mom had brought along a member of the Los Angeles Police Department. They gave me a choice: rehab or jail.

And I really didn’t want to go to jail.

That launched a month of absolute detox hell. At first I slept a bunch. Then I couldn’t sleep at all. I had all these tiny seizures in my brain, and the pain gutted me.

Finally, something happened that changed everything.

My girlfriend showed up at detox and told me she’d figured out a way I didn’t have to go to