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.

How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

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

How innocent we are of our mistakes and how we responsible we are for them.

Once and for all, people must understand that addiction is a disease. It’s critical if we’re going to effectively prevent and treat addiction. Accepting that addiction is an illness will transform our approach to public policy, research, insurance, and criminality; it will change how we feel about addicts, and how they feel about themselves. There’s another essential reason why we must understand that addiction is an illness and not just bad behavior: We punish bad behavior. We treat illness.