Marijuana

Marijuana is one of the first visible signs that Nic Sheff’s life is moving beyond what his family can easily understand or manage. A small bag discovered in his backpack unsettles David Sheff’s picture of his son; later, marijuana becomes the focus of school discipline, a brief and misguided attempt at father-son bonding, and David’s lasting questions about secrecy and intervention. Its importance lies not in serving as a complete explanation for Nic’s later addiction, but in showing how an apparently limited adolescent behavior can expose the distance between what parents believe they know and what is happening in their child’s life.

Discovery and First Explanations

One May afternoon in Inverness, David Sheff packs an overnight bag for Nic, who is staying with a friend. Searching the backpack for a sweater, he finds instead a small bag of marijuana. The discovery follows a moment of suspicion: Nic had recently admitted to taking a few puffs of cigarettes with boys behind the gymnasium, but promised not to do it again. Marijuana makes the uncertainty concrete. David had expected that their closeness would mean he would know if Nic were tempted to try drugs; that expectation is broken by the bag.

The contrast between the object and the child David thinks he sees gives the scene its force. Nic is outside tossing a football with a muscular friend, wearing David’s oversized gray cardigan. His languor, changing moods, and new association with tougher boys seem to David like signs that could point toward marijuana, yet he still sees youth, playfulness, and innocence. Holding the tightly wound green buds, he cannot reconcile those impressions. The bag is at once ordinary and newly conspicuous: a small object that changes the meaning of the afternoon and of his confidence in his son.

When David shows the marijuana to Karen Barbour, she immediately asks whether it belongs to Nic. David and Karen call the boys inside and ask how long Nic has been smoking. Nic says it is the first time they bought it, though they tried it once before. David finds himself confronting a question that had not seemed possible before: whether to trust his son. Nic later says he was curious, did not like the experience, and would not try it again. His explanation reassures David for the moment, but the family’s earlier certainty has already given way to doubt about what Nic may be withholding.

From Private Experiment to School Discipline

The matter returns in a more public form when the freshman dean calls David and Karen to discuss Nic’s suspension for buying marijuana on campus. Nic has been caught outside the cafeteria after lunch buying it from another student; the seller is expelled. The school gives Nic a second chance on probation and requires an afternoon of drug and alcohol counseling. Its counselor describes the incident as a bad choice and an opportunity to make better choices. David and Karen are relieved that Nic has not been expelled and that the school is helping them address a problem they do not have to navigate alone.

As Nic grows older, David sees him spending more time away from home with local boys he regards as stoners. Nic denies using drugs and becomes increasingly adept at covering his tracks. Eventually he admits to using some drugs, describing it as just marijuana, occasional, and no big deal. He promises not to ride in a car with anyone who is high. David warns that marijuana is not harmless for everyone, but his advice and anger do not change Nic’s behavior. The gap between Nic’s reassurances and David’s growing concern becomes part of a wider pattern: the parent is trying to judge risk from the outside, while the son minimizes what is happening.

That pattern also enters the legal system. After Nic is cited for marijuana possession, he fails to appear in court and does not tell David about the citation. The resulting arrest gives David an opportunity to bail him out, which he does while insisting it will be the only time. He believes the arrest will teach Nic a lesson. The incident adds a consequence beyond school discipline, but it does not establish that the lesson has taken hold; the book repeatedly shows how an apparent warning or turning point can fail to produce lasting change.

A Father’s Attempt at Connection

During a visit to David’s parents in Arizona, Nic and David walk through the neighborhood where David had once taken him as a small child. As a teenager, Nic matter-of-factly asks whether his father wants to smoke marijuana. He lights a joint and passes it to David. David, who still smokes occasionally, accepts it. He rationalizes the act as a harmless bonding moment like a father sharing a beer with his son, and the two talk and laugh as the tension between them briefly eases.

The relief does not last. That evening, Nic is again belligerent and annoyed, while David is worried and overwhelmed. In retrospect, David recognizes that smoking with his seventeen-year-old son was wrong. He had been desperate to connect, and that desperation had allowed him to treat a consequential choice as if it were casual. Marijuana thus marks not only Nic’s behavior but also a failure of parental judgment: David’s own history with drugs, which he had not hidden from Nic, did not equip him to see clearly what his son’s use meant. He had believed honesty and closeness would make Nic confide in him, and now wonders whether his own example and the apparent permission of that shared joint complicated the warnings he had given.

Secrecy, Blame, and the Limits of Control

For a long time, David keeps the family’s problem private, partly to protect Nic and preserve others’ good impressions of him. After attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and hearing counselors recommend Al-Anon, David and Karen go to a meeting in Novato. David recognizes how much talking with other families helps, but the meeting’s principle that parents did not cause, could not control, and could not cure an addiction does not immediately quiet his self-blame. He returns in memory to smoking marijuana with Nic and wonders whether that act gave tacit permission. The scene shows how one episode can become a focus for guilt even when the larger course of addiction cannot be reduced to a single cause.

David’s understanding of marijuana also changes as he considers the family’s experience and the stigma surrounding addiction. He learns that relatives may blame themselves, feel shame and rage, and keep their suffering quiet, while public discussion can invite both compassion and judgment. After David writes about the family for The New York Times Magazine, many readers respond with sympathy and accounts of their own losses; others criticize his choices as a parent. Their reactions echo the book’s central tension: openness can help families feel less isolated, yet disclosure also makes them vulnerable to blame.

In his later reflections, David argues for talking with children about drugs early and honestly, while recognizing that parents must decide what details are appropriate to a child’s age. He wishes he had intervened more forcefully while Nic was still young enough for David to make treatment decisions for him. He does not claim that earlier treatment would have prevented relapse; he reasons that it might have helped, and that time in treatment would at least have kept Nic off drugs while he was there. His advice is to err toward earlier intervention rather than wait for unmistakable danger, while avoiding the claim that marijuana alone explains what followed. The object’s recurring place in the story is therefore both concrete and limited: it signals a family’s first visible crisis around drugs, but the narrative’s larger account resists turning that early sign into a simple, inevitable path.