1970s

The 1970s are both a remembered setting and a point of comparison in David Sheff’s account of drug use and addiction. He recalls a youth culture in which marijuana and other drugs were readily available, then looks back against the idea that drug use in that era was harmless. The period’s significance lies in this contrast: personal memories of access and social belonging coexist with a later awareness of casualties, changing evidence, and the limits of easy explanations for addiction.

Social Context and Availability

David Sheff places his adolescent experience within the drug culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. In his middle-American neighborhood, one neighbor grew marijuana under lights in an attic and another sold LSD. At school, drugs were not limited to one social group: he recalls marijuana and pills circulating among stoners, athletes, and academically minded girls. In the evenings, he and friends got high, spent time on the street, or went to someone’s home, sometimes slipping in unnoticed and sometimes being drawn into dinner with their parents.

The memoir connects that availability to a wider generational shift. Earlier generations of children might have secretly consumed alcohol, while the young people of Sheff’s generation encountered marijuana in abundance and a broader range of drugs. Sheff also recalls paying for marijuana with his allowance and newspaper-route earnings. His parents did not know about his drug use, a silence that complicates any simple picture of what adults understood about young people’s lives at the time.

Memory and the Idea of Harmless Use

Looking back, Sheff acknowledges that drugs were different in some respects: research he cites found that the average joint or pipeful contained twice as much THC in the present day as a decade earlier, while marijuana a decade earlier had itself been stronger than in the 1960s and 1970s. He also notes reports that psychedelics and ecstasy could be mixed with or replaced by methamphetamine and other substances. These comparisons do not, in his account, vindicate earlier drug use. Rather, he distinguishes changes in potency and supply from the mistaken belief that drugs were safe.

Sheff sets the nostalgic idea of harmless use against the costs he says were visible in retrospect: accidents, suicides, overdoses, and people from the 1960s and 1970s whom he later encountered living on the streets, some without homes. The account does not claim that every user suffered the same fate; it emphasizes that survival could make a dangerous period look safer than it was, while the people who did not survive disappeared from that reassuring memory.

Methamphetamine Across Different Eras

The memoir places the 1970s within a longer, uneven history of methamphetamine use in the United States. Its use had waned, risen, and waned again since the drug’s initial heyday; by the period Sheff describes, experts considered meth more potent and widespread than before. What had been concentrated in western cities had spread into the Midwest, the South, and the East Coast. The book thus uses the earlier era not as a complete explanation for a later crisis, but as one point in a recurring pattern of changing reach and public recognition.

Evidence from 2006 gives that later spread a concrete scale. A national sample of 3,400 drug-enforcement agencies found that 40 percent considered methamphetamine their most significant drug problem, the first time that response had formed a plurality in the survey. Treatment admissions for meth addiction had risen from 28,000 a year in 1993 to about 150,000 in 2005, more than a fivefold increase. The account also reports that meth-related crime had become a major concern in some communities, where officials attributed 80 to 100 percent of crime to the drug. These figures describe later conditions, not the experience of every person who used drugs in the 1970s.

What the Period Can and Cannot Explain

Sheff resists treating a decade, family structure, or social class as a sufficient cause of addiction. He considers whether divorce or privilege might help explain a child’s vulnerability, but sets those possibilities against the presence of addiction among people from intact families and across socioeconomic circumstances. His conclusion is cautious: addiction may arise from an unknowable combination of nature and nurture, and a population-level pattern cannot establish why a particular person becomes addicted.

That uncertainty also shapes the memoir’s retrospective account of treatment. At meetings, Sheff heard people in recovery say that parents who had intervened or compelled treatment had saved their lives; he also heard accounts of parents who tried and lost their children. He rejects the promise of a reliable outcome, while recognizing that treatment could interrupt cycles of drug use and preserve a chance of recovery. In this framing, the 1970s remain more than a period label: they anchor a personal memory of widespread exposure, while the later evidence and family stories warn against turning either nostalgia or statistics into certainty.