If you subscribe to the idea that #‎ addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children - paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic - are seriously ill, slowly dying. We'd never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.

Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying

Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully...There are millions of treacherous moments.

This stigma associated with drug use--the belief that bad kids use, good kids don't, and those with full-blown addiction are weak, dissolute, and pathetic--has contributed to the escalation of use and has hampered treatment more than any single other factor.

I didn't cause it. I can't control it. I can't cure it.

When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity.

A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.