1960s

The 1960s mark the beginning of the narrator’s own drug experience and the period against which he measures later changes in drug use, public knowledge, and family life. In his recollection, marijuana was easy to find among high-school students and initially seemed harmless; in retrospect, the apparent innocence of that first encounter contrasts with the addiction that later shapes his family’s life and with evidence of drugs’ risks. The memoir treats the decade not as a complete explanation for those consequences, but as a formative setting whose assumptions about drugs proved dangerously incomplete.

A childhood framed by changing times

The narrator recalls childhood as a time of street games, neighborhood gatherings, family dinners, and television, but questions whether the remembered security of that world was as complete as nostalgia suggests. Quietly shared neighborhood news included a child’s death by suicide and the death of a girl in a car accident involving a driver who was high on drugs. Alongside the familiar routines, drugs were becoming more visible. The narrator places this shift within a national history: an abundance of drugs, many previously unknown or unavailable, entered schools and neighborhoods from the mid-1960s onward. He notes that his neighborhood’s proximity to Mexico made drugs cheap and abundant, while cautioning that geography alone probably did not account for the change.

The period also shaped the narrator’s later understanding of generational difference. He remembers the late 1960s and 1970s as years when young people encountered not only widely available marijuana but a range of drugs unfamiliar to earlier generations. In his own middle-American neighborhood, one resident grew marijuana under lights in an attic and another sold LSD. At school, access crossed social groups: marijuana and pills were not confined to students identified as stoners. His parents, despite their fashionable clothes and lively gatherings with music, maintained a clear boundary around drug use; their parties offered soft drinks and coffee rather than alcohol. The contrast places youthful drug culture beside, rather than simply within, adult social life.

First encounters and the appeal of marijuana

In 1968, as a high-school freshman, the narrator accepted a joint offered by a boy from his block. He did not experience the dramatic effects he had associated with sensational stories about LSD, and that first try seemed uneventful. When an older brother later passed him a glowing roach held in an alligator clip, the apparent lack of harm made another encounter seem unremarkable. The memoir presents this sequence as a gradual lowering of concern: a drug that seemed ordinary and mild did not initially register as a serious danger.

Availability and peer culture reinforced that impression. Students sold single joints for fifty cents and ounce bags for ten dollars near the school bike rack, and offered hits in bathrooms and on the way to and from school. The narrator describes marijuana as a social passkey for someone who had felt lonely and insecure. It made conversation and laughter easier, reduced his shyness around girls, and changed how music and nature seemed to him. He also describes a double effect: marijuana could make the world feel more vivid while blurring his perceptions, and could help him feel when emotionally numb or feel less when overwhelmed. Peer pressure, rebellion, companionship, and relief from insecurity all contributed to continued use; no single motive accounts for it.

Retrospective judgment and family consequences

The narrator distinguishes the contemporary memory of supposedly harmless drug use from what he later understood about its risks. He acknowledges that marijuana in the earlier period was less potent than later samples, while also noting that the marijuana of a decade earlier had itself been stronger than that of the 1960s and 1970s. More important to his retrospective account, research had documented a wide range of physical and psychological harms, including harms associated with marijuana. Some people who remember the period survived without lasting damage; others did not. The memoir cites accidents, suicides, overdoses, and people from the era who later lived with severe consequences, rejecting survival as proof that drug use was safe.

That change in understanding shaped how the narrator spoke with Nic Sheff. He says he began talking to Nic about drugs when Nic was seven or eight, returning to the subject early and often, describing people who had been harmed or killed and sharing his own mistakes. Yet knowledge of the risks did not give him control over Nic’s later choices. When he learned that Nic had used methamphetamine, his pleas for rehabilitation did not persuade him. By then Nic was over eighteen, and the narrator could not commit him to treatment simply because of concern about his drug use. The narrator’s regret that he had not intervened while Nic was younger is explicitly qualified: he cannot know whether treatment would have helped or whether Nic would have been ready to hear it.

From period memory to national context

The memoir connects the 1960s’ history of expanding drug availability to later waves of methamphetamine use without treating them as identical. It describes the drug’s use in the United States as waxing and waning over time, and reports that experts considered the later epidemic more potent and widespread than earlier outbreaks. By the mid-2000s, reports described methamphetamine as a major problem across regions beyond the western cities where it had previously been concentrated. In a 2006 national survey of drug enforcement agencies, 40 percent identified methamphetamine as their most significant drug problem; treatment admissions for methamphetamine addiction had also risen from about 28,000 annually in 1993 to about 150,000 in 2005. These figures belong to a later period, but they give scale to the social change that the narrator’s personal memories cannot measure alone.

The account also resists turning broad patterns into a prediction about any one child. It describes addiction as crossing economic circumstances, education, race, geography, and intelligence, and suggests that an unknowable combination of nature and nurture may contribute. The narrator repeatedly returns to uncertainty: divorce, privilege, or any other single circumstance cannot explain every case, and outcomes in recovery are not guaranteed. In this structure, the 1960s are neither a simple origin story for Nic’s addiction nor a vanished age of harmlessness. They are the narrator’s first reference point for understanding how ordinary access, social belonging, and mistaken confidence about safety can coexist—and how much remains unknowable even when a family tries to intervene.