“An enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains”

“An enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains” is the Shakespearean image that opens Part II, “His drug of choice.” By joining the pleasure of intoxication to the loss of reason, it gives a stark frame to the memoir’s movement from Nic Sheff’s meth use to David Sheff’s own earlier experience with the drug.

Source and Wording

The passage is an epigraph attributed to William Shakespeare and identified as coming from The Tempest. It reads: “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts.” The image makes the drug an enemy admitted into the body: its apparent pleasure is bound to the theft of judgment and self-command.

Placement and Significance

The epigraph appears at the start of Part II, under the heading “His drug of choice.” Immediately before that division, David Sheff registers his horror that Nic has used meth and acknowledges his own experience with the drug. Shakespeare’s warning therefore opens more than a discussion of a substance; it establishes a connection between the son’s present danger and the father’s past.

The next chapter recalls David’s first summer in Berkeley, when his roommate Charles came home with crystal meth after a dealer had run out of cocaine. Charles placed the crystals on a thrift-shop mirror and arranged the powder into four parallel rails with a single-edge razor. Against that concrete preparation, the epigraph’s language of transformation acquires a grimly literal setting: the chapter begins not with an abstract warning but with the drug laid out for use. The quotation’s contrast between revelry and becoming beastlike anticipates the book’s concern with pleasure giving way to impaired judgment and harm.