Berkeley

Berkeley carries two connected stories in David Sheff’s account: it is the family’s home as they await Nic’s birth, and later the university city where both David and Nic confront the place of drugs in student life. The city’s domestic calm and academic promise recur beside a less reassuring history of drug use, making Berkeley a setting where private family hopes meet wider patterns of addiction.

Family Home and Early Years

In the summer of 1982, David Sheff and Vicki live in Berkeley in a whitewashed clapboard bungalow built in the 1920s, screened from the street by black bamboo. Their days seem suspended as they wait for their baby, expected in July. An ultrasound confirms that the child is a boy, and they prepare a nursery with a white crib, a light-blue dresser, shelves of children’s books, and two large stuffed panda bears beside the doorway. A friend lends them a family cradle, buttery yellow and shaped like a new moon, which hangs in the living room. The preparations make the coming child tangible before his arrival; on the morning of July 20, Vicki’s contractions begin, and the couple drives to the hospital.

The house establishes Berkeley as a place of domestic anticipation, but the city is not only a backdrop to family life. It also becomes a site where the memoir connects education, youthful independence, and exposure to drugs. These strands are not presented as a simple causal chain: the account repeatedly resists reducing addiction to any one family circumstance, social class, or location.

David Sheff’s Berkeley Years

David transfers to the University of California, Berkeley, after an earlier period of college life with Charles. Accepted before his academic record has suffered, he enrolls for the fall and chooses an individual social-science field major focused on death and human consciousness. He throws himself into his studies, but the campus’s intellectual opportunities coexist with ready access to drugs. Cocaine and marijuana are common features of some weekends, and one student’s father, a doctor, supplies Quaaludes by prescription in an attempt to keep his son away from street drugs. David uses drugs heavily, though he understands his use as comparable to that of many around him.

His friendship with Charles sharpens the contrast between their choices. Charles’s drinking and drug use escalate, while David generally stops late at night because he has class the next morning. That difference does not make David’s own use harmless; it gives him, in retrospect, a point of comparison that later informs his fears about Nic. Berkeley thus enters the narrative as a university where academic purpose and intoxication can occupy the same student culture without canceling each other out.

Nic at the University

Years later, Nic chooses to attend the University of California, Berkeley. On a warm August afternoon, David and Karen Barbour drive him there with Jasper and Daisy. After stopping for pizza, the family reaches Bowles Hall, an old Tudor dormitory. Jasper admires its castle-like appearance as they carry Nic’s luggage through the stone archway and up two flights of stairs. Nic’s roommates are unpacking; the room already contains signs of their different tastes, from a student’s homemade computer to a collection of pop-music CDs that seems poorly matched to Nic’s uncompromising musical preferences.

David suggests that Nic contact counselors at the health center or his therapist if the transition proves difficult. Nic agrees, but David doubts he will seek help. A week later, a roommate reports that Nic has not appeared for several days, leaving David distraught. When Nic calls two days afterward, he says college is not working and describes himself as depressed and not ready for it. He says he is not using much. David assumes drugs may be involved and raises rehabilitation, but Nic’s explanation offers another possible account of his difficulty.

Nic also blames the impersonal bureaucracy of the university. He says he tried to follow David’s suggestion and see a counselor, but waited an hour just to learn that the first appointment available was a week away. He proposes taking a year off, getting a job, and recovering his physical and mental shape before applying to smaller colleges. He returns to the family home and agrees to a set of rules: therapy, curfews, help around the house, work, and new college applications. His later acceptance to Hampshire College initially appears to restore a forward path. In retrospect, Berkeley marks a significant interruption in Nic’s education, while the account leaves open how much of his distress came from depression, drug use, or their interaction.

Methamphetamine and the Wider Region

Berkeley’s significance also sits within the Bay Area’s history of methamphetamine. During David’s first summer in Berkeley, Charles moves from Tucson and shares an apartment with him. One evening Charles brings home crystal meth after his dealer has run out of cocaine. David tries the drug. He describes an intense initial euphoria followed by a depleted, agitated comedown and a day of sleep that costs him school. The episode places David’s own past exposure beside the later crisis in his family, without suggesting that his experience and Nic’s addiction followed the same course.

The memoir locates the early-1960s illegal speed craze in a wider San Francisco setting. Illicit methamphetamine laboratories appeared in San Francisco in 1962, and the drug spread through the Haight Ashbury. David Smith, founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, recalls that meth brought severe consequences to a neighborhood already familiar with other drugs. In later decades, meth use rose and fell before becoming more widespread across the United States. By 2006, surveys of law-enforcement agencies showed methamphetamine emerging as a leading drug problem, while treatment admissions for meth addiction had risen more than fivefold between 1993 and 2005. The account also stresses that use crosses class, race, and regional boundaries; Berkeley’s university setting cannot be treated as either an explanation for addiction or a safeguard against it.

The geography therefore works by juxtaposition rather than diagnosis. Berkeley contains a nursery prepared for a wanted child, a campus associated with intellectual promise, and memories of student drug use. Its proximity in the narrative to the San Francisco methamphetamine history broadens the frame from one family’s experience to a public-health problem, while the memoir refuses to claim that any single place, background, or parental decision can explain who becomes addicted.