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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.
David Sheff
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.
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.
Everybody tells you over and over again that addiction is a disease. But when I read Nic's book I understood not just that this is a disease, but what the disease means.
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.
So often we have this image of what drug addiction looks like, and it's not fun. Our loved ones who go down that path are in pain.
To try to help somebody who doesn't want to be helped is ludicrous. It doesn't work.
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.
Addiction is a disease like anything else. It's like cancer, like heart disease, like diabetes.
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.
Every relapse is dangerous, but often it takes multiple relapses before someone finally gets sober for good.
So many times in the middle of an interview I've had people say, 'Can we go off the record?'
I spent years searching for effective programs that would lower drug use and prevent addiction.
Few adults realize what a huge force video games have become in children's lives.
No, I don't believe in tough love. I just believe in love.
Well, addiction does start with a choice.
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.
After a hellish decade, my son got and stayed sober.
Elvis Presley's music said, 'Free your body.' The Beatles said, 'Free your mind.'
Like most people I knew, I thought drug addicts were the kinds of people we see in doorways in neighbourhoods most of us try to avoid - people obviously strung out, often homeless and possibly psychotic. I didn't think my son could become addicted, but he had.
I don't object to AA at all - only the programs that insist that it's the only way to get clean and to stay clean.
Some parents want to be popular, but that's not their job.
There isn't just one way to get healthy and sober and to stop using.
The motivations for using drugs, often it's pretty obvious and common: you know, peer pressure. You know, kids are struggling growing up.
I finally stopped worrying what people would think. I found out that almost everybody has some secret, some dark fear that if people knew this about them they wouldn't like them anymore, or would look down on them.
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.
There are many things I wish I could redo as a parent.
This idea that some kids have now in some communities that if they haven't filled out their college resumes by the time they're 12, they are going to fail in life, it's a lot of stress on kids.
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?
The tragic fact is that with addiction, like many other illnesses, sometimes you can do everything right and people die.
It's hard to find someone who did as many drugs for as long and in such dangerous combinations as Nic - spending years going to Oakland and finding abandoned warehouses, getting beaten up, getting threatened by a guy with a crossbow. By all accounts, he shouldn't have made it, but he did.
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.
You know, we think about addiction as a morally reprehensible choice, but addicts act crazy because, in a way, that they are.
That's the difference between even the best video game and what's going on in books. Video games can inspire a reaction, but not the emotions.
Like so many of us, I'm brokenhearted about the death of the remarkably talented actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.
When change takes place gradually, it's difficult to comprehend its meaning.
Though addiction is a disease - a brain disease that's often progressive - addicts who relapse are often blamed.
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.
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.
When he was on the streets, I was consumed with Nic. I was obsessed with him to the point that I could barely function.
David Hockney is best known for his work with paint and canvas, but he has also worked in media as diverse as Polaroid-photo collage and fax painting.
I came home one day and Nick was in his bedroom reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird', and the tears were just flowing down his cheeks, at the terrible injustice that was being described in that book and the bravery of fighting against it.
Drugs shift the way that we think. So, yeah, the logical thing would be to get help, but that's not the way addicts operate, which is why it's really, really hard to get someone to understand that they need treatment.
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.
One of my dearest friends is alive only because of AA. But it doesn't help a lot of people. And everyone is different, and everyone needs different kinds of treatments.
Having been hit by drug addiction, knowing how many are hit by it and what a big problem it is in our neighborhoods and our culture, I feel a responsibility to do something. I can see what's wrong with the system - that we have to recognize mental illness as we do cancer or broken bones - and how we need to make it better.
When I was a child, my parents didn't know anything about drugs. They didn't even drink.
Nic was a lovely child, though of course I'm prejudiced. I'm his father.
After writing about addiction in a pair of books, I frequently hear from addicts and their family members about serial relapses followed by treatments followed by more relapses. It's not uncommon for addicts to go through a dozen treatment programs.
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.
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