Every relapse is dangerous, but often it takes multiple relapses before someone finally gets sober for good.
After a hellish decade, my son got and stayed sober.
Since his breakout role in 'Call Me By Your Name,' Chalamet has been described as a young Leonardo DeCaprio and James Dean. Not only does Chalamet resemble my son when he was younger, but he embodies his spirit.
Your children live or die without you. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It's a devastating realization, but liberating.
If you love someone who's an addict and their use is life-threatening, you don't wait until they hit bottom because that can mean that they're going to die. You have to do everything you can to get them in treatment.
The rest of the world may devour Japanese hardware - from Honda Civics to Sony Walkmans - but Japanese software, such as books, movies and recordings, has had little impact outside Japan. The exception is video games.
Nick spent his first years on walks in his stroller and Snugli, playing in Berkeley parks and baby gyms and visiting zoos and aquariums. His mother and I divorced when he was 4. No child benefits from the bitterness and savagery of a divorce like ours.
There isn't just one way to get healthy and sober and to stop using.
Reading Bukowski and Burroughs and Henry Miller doesn't necessarily mean that a kid is going to try to emulate their debauchery to the point that Nic did, but he really was fascinated by it.
If a child had another disease, we'd be open about what we were going through, but addiction is stigmatised and comes with shame and guilt.
Though addiction is a disease - a brain disease that's often progressive - addicts who relapse are often blamed.
My son is living proof that those like him can not only be treated, but can live lives free of the pain that plagued them and the disease that controlled them.
The tragic fact is that with addiction, like many other illnesses, sometimes you can do everything right and people die.
I'd heard about rehab, where you send people with drug problems, but I soon learned that there's no standard definition of it; instead it's a generic word for a wide variety of treatments, including some that are outrageous. Past-life therapy? Exorcism?
But I sent letters to people in the music business. And one day I got a phone call from somebody and he asked me when I was born and where I was born. And, you know, three or four days later I got a call. Someone said, you know, Yoko Ono wanted to meet me in New York. I got on a plane. And the next day I was having coffee with John Lennon.
The war on drugs is a joke. We spend $40 billion a year, and the proof that it's a failure is that any kid can get almost any drug they want in any city in America within half an hour.
Twelve-step programs require people to accept their powerlessness and turn their lives over to God or another higher power. Many adolescents question religion, and in general teenagers aren't going to turn their lives over to anyone.
I totally believe parents should talk to their kids about drugs. I totally believe that educating them in every way is really important. But on the other hand, I've learned it's not as simple as that.
Nick's mother and I were attentive, probably overly attentive - part of the first wave of parents obsessed with our children in a self-conscious way.
When, you know, when Nic became addicted, I was completely uneducated, and basically everything I assumed at the time turned out to be wrong. I guess the main thing is that I was so blindsided, that I had this idea of, you know, what an addict looks like, and it didn't look like Nic. And I realized that, you know, anybody can become addicted.
