David Sheff

“If you love someone who's an addict and their use is life-threatening, you don't wait until they hit bottom because that can mean that they're going to die. You have to do everything you can to get them in treatment.”

“Addiction is a disease like anything else. It's like cancer, like heart disease, like diabetes.”

“Some parents want to be popular, but that's not their job.”

“At some point, parents may become inured to a child's self-destruction, but I never did.”

“One of my dearest friends is alive only because of AA. But it doesn't help a lot of people. And everyone is different, and everyone needs different kinds of treatments.”

“Everyone's generation probably feels like they're parenting in a better way.”

“I'm not sure if I know any 'functional' families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don't have a full range of problems.”

“My son is living proof that those like him can not only be treated, but can live lives free of the pain that plagued them and the disease that controlled them.”

“Drugs shift the way that we think. So, yeah, the logical thing would be to get help, but that's not the way addicts operate, which is why it's really, really hard to get someone to understand that they need treatment.”

“Sometimes I am all right. Is this what they call letting go? I have let go, if letting go means I am all right sometimes.”

“You know, we think about addiction as a morally reprehensible choice, but addicts act crazy because, in a way, that they are.”

“After writing about addiction in a pair of books, I frequently hear from addicts and their family members about serial relapses followed by treatments followed by more relapses. It's not uncommon for addicts to go through a dozen treatment programs.”

“It's hard to find someone who did as many drugs for as long and in such dangerous combinations as Nic - spending years going to Oakland and finding abandoned warehouses, getting beaten up, getting threatened by a guy with a crossbow. By all accounts, he shouldn't have made it, but he did.”

“Many doctors are stuck in the idea that addiction is a choice, and they don't treat that.”

“Reading Bukowski and Burroughs and Henry Miller doesn't necessarily mean that a kid is going to try to emulate their debauchery to the point that Nic did, but he really was fascinated by it.”

“Nick's mother and I were attentive, probably overly attentive - part of the first wave of parents obsessed with our children in a self-conscious way.”

“... Gunpei Yokoi, asked his boss, 'What should I make?' Nintendo chief executive Hiroshi Yamauchi replied, 'Something great.'Game Over Nintendo's Battle to Dominate Videogames”

“The motivations for using drugs, often it's pretty obvious and common: you know, peer pressure. You know, kids are struggling growing up.”

“If a child had another disease, we'd be open about what we were going through, but addiction is stigmatised and comes with shame and guilt.”

“I chose a rehab center for Nic that was recommended by a friend who had sent her son there. The program lasted 28 days, after which he relapsed. Over the next six years, he was admitted to six residential treatment programs and four outpatient programs. He would do better for a while, but then relapse. Each relapse was crushing.”