Beautiful Boy: A Heartbreaking Memoir of a Father's Struggle with His Son's Addiction and the Journey to Recovery

by David Sheff

I tried everything I could to prevent my son’s fall into meth addiction. It would have been no easier to have seen him strung out on heroin or cocaine, but as every parent of a meth addict comes to learn, this drug has a unique, horrific quality.

When I watched the Beautiful Boy movie, I was reminded of parts of Beautiful Boy in which I describe crystal meth as the worst drug of them all. Now I look at the drug-use and addiction crisis in America and realize there isn’t a “worst drug.” Meth is definitely one of the most neurotoxic, but if the worst drug is the one that kills the most people, currently the title goes to the opioids that are killing more people under 50 years old than ANYTHING ELSE. These pain pills like OxyContin and Vicodin and street drugs like heroin and fentanyl (and combinations) killed 72,000 people in 2017. That’s about 200 a day.