Christian Science Monitor
Yoko: A Biography, by David Sheff
David Sheff was the last journalist to interview Yoko Ono and John Lennon before Lennon’s 1980 murder, and he and Ono subsequently became friends. His engaging and intimate biography provides a full picture of the woman unfairly accused of breaking up the Beatles, highlighting her long, provocative career as an avant-garde artist.
San Francisco Chronicle
David Sheff’s lifelong friendship with Yoko Ono proves fertile fodder in revelatory new biography
By Zack Ruskin
March 21, 2025
John Lennon once proclaimed Yoko Ono to be “the most famous unknown artist in the world.” But that didn’t keep critics from viciously blaming his wife for the Beatles’ demise. The real story of Yoko Ono is one of a seminal activist, artist and musician whose influence — on her own merit — stretches the globe.
Bestselling author David Sheff has known this to be true for a long time. Now, nearly 50 years later, the former music journalist has finally distilled his archive of interviews and notes into “Yoko: A Biography,” a decisive rebuke to decades of slander and scorn to paint the full picture of a woman without equal in the 20th century.
Best known for his 2008 memoir “Beautiful Boy,” an illuminating yet heartbreaking work chronicled Sheff’s struggles to help his son overcome a methamphetamine addiction, the longtime Marin County resident is scheduled to appear at Book Passage in Corte Madera on April 10, to discuss his relationship with Ono.
It all began with a fateful assignment from Playboy magazine, who flew a 24-year-old Sheff to New York City to spend three weeks with Lennon and Ono. The article that would ultimately serve as one of the pair’s final interviews, and it all came about, according to Sheff, because the stars were aligned.
“I got a call from her assistant asking me when and where I was born,” he recalled. “It was weird, but I told them, and the next day, I got a call saying that Yoko had agreed to meet me. My horoscope and numerological charts somehow blessed me. Yoko told me that I had the same numbers as John, and that was partly why she agreed to go forward with the interview.”
For his assignment, Sheff hung out at their apartment, shadowed them in the studio as they recorded songs for their 1980 album “Double Fantasy,” and chatted with the couple at local coffee shops. It was during this period that he would first come to appreciate Ono’s role as Lennon’s creative equal.
“They really were partners,” he said. “I was in the booth with them, and they would ask each other for their opinions and make decisions together. John was very deferential to her. When I saw her record the song ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss,’ it was so powerful that it was clear she was an artist.”
Soon after, with Sheff back home in Los Angeles, he remembers he was watching Monday Night Football when he heard Howard Cosell interrupt the broadcast to share news of Lennon’s death. The young journalist immediately flew back to New York, becoming one of the few people Ono eventually permitted to be with her during a period of profound suffering.
“It took me a while to finally get in to see her, but when I did, it was to see somebody who was completely broken,” he recalled. “We cried together because there wasn't a lot to say.
“That was the beginning of me going to spend time with her.”
Ono’s fascinating life started long before she met Sheff, of course. Raised in Tokyo, her childhood was marked by wealth and loneliness. Born into one of Japan’s most prosperous business families, Ono’s first visit to San Francisco at the age of 2 would also mark her first time meeting her father, then the head of the San Francisco branch of Yokohama Specie Bank. Often separated, Ono’s father was still statewide when her life was upended by the horrors of World War II.
Later, following Lennon’s death, Ono would frequently return to San Francisco, even planning to move to the area in the 1980s at a time when New York felt “especially dangerous because of threats on her life,” according to Sheff.
His biography makes a strong case against any suggestion that Ono caused the Beatles’ split while highlighting her numerous contributions to the worlds of music, sculpture, performance art and activism.
Combining countless hours of interviews spanning Sheff and Ono’s friendship as well as chats with her friends, family, peers and admirers, “Yoko” is, in the words of Sheff’s editor Eamon Dolan, “neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job.”
“I've been an editor for over 30 years now,” noted Dolan, who has worked with Sheff since 2005. “I've edited a lot of biographies, and I've read even more, and I've never seen a book do as good a job of striking that balance regarding their subject as this one does.”
Among the voices who helped achieve that balance was Sheff’s longtime friend and famed rock ‘n’ roll photographer Bob Gruen, another one of Ono’s close friends.
“The first thing (of David’s) that I read was his Playboy interview with John and Yoko,” Gruen said. “I think it’s the best interview anybody ever did with John. I often tell people, if they want to know about John Lennon, read what he said in that interview. He tells all.”
As for what Sheff hopes readers will take from his new biography, he believes Ono’s message of hope and peace is more powerful and relevant as ever.
“When ‘Imagine’ came out, it was released as a John Lennon song. John did the music and performed the song, but he later really regretted not crediting Yoko,” Sheff explained. “When I interviewed him in 1980, he made a big point of telling me that Yoko was the co-writer of ‘Imagine.’ And it wasn't just that she co-wrote the lyrics — which she did — it was really her song in a way.
‘Imagine’ encapsulates Yoko's thinking, this idea that if we imagine a better world, we can create one.”
The Conversation
In 1945, when Yoko Ono was 12, her home city of Tokyo was firebombed. With her mother and siblings, she fled to the safety of a farming village in Nagano Prefecture. Food was scarce. During this time, Ono, as the eldest child, often had to help find provisions for her family. At one point, while she and her brother Keisuke were lying down looking up at the sky, she asked him to create a dream menu: if access was no obstacle, what foods would he choose?
Her prompt, fired by her imagination, inspired hope for better days ahead. Her brother believes this was her first work of conceptual art.
This is difficult to argue with, given so much of Ono’s art has recurring motifs of hope and joyful human interaction. David Sheff’s Yoko is the latest offering in a new generation of books revisiting Ono and her legacy within popular culture. It creates a portrait of an artist – now 92 – who has championed the power of positivity, no matter the adverse conditions.
Review: Yoko: A Biography – David Sheff (Simon & Schuster)
Ono’s career as a conceptual artist was well underway by the time she met John Lennon in 1966, when he visited her about-to-be-staged solo exhibition in London. Nonetheless, when the Beatles broke up in 1970, a misogynistic narrative swiftly blamed her for playing a substantial role in the band’s demise.
Journalists and fans accused Ono of being a “homewrecker” (Lennon was still married when they became a couple), but the conceptual artist’s even greater sin seemed to be that she was not a blonde, leggy model typical of rock-star girlfriends.
It is little wonder that, a few years later, some of her songwriting would call upon the image of the witch – a historical figure especially symbolic of women’s misrepresentation within society. Ono’s reclamation, through songs like Woman of Salem (1973) and Yes, I’m a Witch (1974) – also the title of her 2007 album – is fitting.
The 1968 release of the Lennon–Ono album Two Virgins, which featured experimental music and had the couple pose nude for its cover, prompted a moral panic. As Sheff writes, “people went from attacking Yoko as a homewrecker to accusing her of destroying Lennon as an artist. Talk of John being under Yoko’s spell percolated; she was forcing him to do outrageous – nutty, abhorrent – things.”
Few would deny Ono – as artist, musician and woman – has experienced her own set of witch trials. Some still blame her for the Beatles’ breakup, see her conceptual art as nonsensical garbage, or believe her own musical output is nothing more than a screaming banshee’s wail.
Correctives to such unforgiving and tired narratives are necessary. This is why David Sheff’s biography is so important.
Biographer and ‘good friend’
Sheff admits from the outset that his position as biographer is paired with that of a longtime friend. But he also assures readers he did his “best to strip the varnish away” to reveal a more authentic Ono. That close proximity to his subject makes for a compelling account.
The journalist met Lennon and Ono in September 1980, spending several weeks with them to write a magazine profile. They were happy with the resulting article. The day after he spoke with them about it, Lennon was killed. Sheff became good friends with Ono and got to know their son Sean, becoming one of those who helped her survive “the season of glass” following Lennon’s murder.
In 2002, she and Sean “helped save the life” of Sheff’s son, during a period of homelessness and drug addiction. Ono later granted Sheff permission to title the memoir about his son “Beautiful Boy”, after Lennon’s song.
He interviews scores of family members, friends and colleagues, while drawing upon his own experiences with Ono. In a telling passage, which speaks to Ono’s interest in creative visualisation, Sheff explains that she believed that “the words she used – in everything from song titles to conversation – would influence the future. She wanted to fill her brain with positive thoughts, not negative ones.” Some have refused to believe this benevolent Yoko Ono exists.
Privilege and emotional poverty
Ono was born on February 18 1933 in Tokyo, to one of Japan’s wealthiest families. Her father was a bank executive while her mother’s family, the Yasudas, were responsible for what later became Fuji Bank. Despite her privileged upbringing, which also saw her family move between Japan and the United States, she felt her parents were emotionally distant. As she grew older, she received mixed messages about what they saw as her purpose in life: was it marriage or a career?
Ono was the first woman to be accepted to study philosophy at the elite Gakushuin University in the fall of 1952, but soon left for the US to study at the women’s liberal arts college Sarah Lawrence, outside New York. There, she focused on composing music and writing poems and stories, while also investigating the city’s art scene – and met and married her first husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, in 1956. Soon after, she was mixing with visual artists and composers like John Cage, who was both. By 1960, she was hosting art and music events at a loft she rented in New York’s bohemian downtown. Performing and exhibiting her own work soon followed.
Before she met and married Lennon, Ono was married a second time, in 1963, to Anthony Cox. Cox was an American painter, sculptor and film producer who rescued her from a mental hospital in Tokyo, where she was placed after a series of suicide attempts that followed a barrage of criticism of her work. “She was trying to connect through her work, but she’d never felt more alone,” Sheff writes.
With Cox, who she was still married to when she met Lennon, she had a daughter, Kyoko, in 1963. A year later – with her husband’s encouragement – a book called Grapefruit, filled with Ono’s “instruction pieces”, was published. Despite the deep despair she had felt, her life had turned around and she was newly motivated to share her art with the world.
Playful positivity
Sheff smartly conveys the first moments Ono and Lennon realised they were on the same wavelength: as artists and as people. In their first meeting, when Lennon visited Ono’s Indica exhibition in London, he climbed a ladder and held up a magnifying glass to the ceiling, where he saw the word yes.
Another piece he noticed was Painting to Hammer a Nail, which comprised a white wooden panel, a hammer on a chain, and a can of nails just beneath. He asked to hammer a nail in, but as the exhibit was not yet open, Ono did not want him to do it. After another moment, she agreed he could, if he paid five shillings to do so. Lennon then offered her an imaginary five shillings to hammer in an equally imaginary nail.
Ono was charmed by the playful response. Lennon was struck with the positivity and humour inherent in Ono’s work: it contradicted his view of avant-garde art as pretentious and overly self-serious.
Sheff points out Ono’s work often asks audiences to imagine and create with her. Famously, her “instruction pieces”, which first gained visibility during the 1960s (helped by her book Grapefruit), asked those interacting with the art to do something or think about certain things. Here, the artist and audience were actively working together.
In Self Portrait (1965), a mirror tucked into an envelope meant the portrait in question was not of Ono, but of the person glimpsing their reflection, Sheff writes. Ono did not summon her audience into a world of whimsy for whimsy’s sake, but into a space where artist and audience were co-creating new vantage points from which to admire the world’s everyday wonders.
Mrs Yoko Ono Lennon
By March 1969, Ono was officially Mrs Yoko Ono Lennon. Their marriage was life-changing in myriad ways: both truly felt they had found their perfect match. In 1975, they would welcome a son, Sean. The couple collaborated in art and music, but the union was not beloved by all.
Criticism of Ono ran the gamut from descriptions of her as an oddball interloper in Lennon’s music-making to outright racist remarks because she was Japanese. Sheff shares glimpses that depict just how mean-spirited some of the 1970s media coverage was. But despite the negativity the couple encountered, they enjoyed a loving, meaningful and productive partnership.
Ono’s world changed forever on December 8 1980, when her husband was shot and killed outside their New York home. She was beside him when it happened. Sheff recounts his memories of her unimaginable grief and the resilience she somehow found in the aftermath of Lennon’s murder. Since her husband’s death, she has dedicated a substantial portion of her life to championing Lennon’s legacy, as well as advocating for gun control in the US.
Ono’s own artistic accomplishments and place in the historical record are rightly given full attention throughout the book. Recent retrospective exhibits, including the Tate Modern’s 2024 Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind in London, demonstrate the longstanding cultural impact of her conceptual art. But Sheff also provides welcome insights into her musical career.
‘First female punk rocker’
Ono’s 1974 sold-out tour of Japan is a noteworthy inclusion, as her musical output has received more than its share of negative criticism. Even in 2025, there are memes that assert Ono’s music is unlistenable and among the worst ever created. Anyone familiar with her discography, however, knows most of her work features singing (not screaming). But it has been difficult to pry Ono’s reputation away from her more avant-garde forays into music
In 2017, Ono was officially credited with co-writing 1971’s Imagine, with her late husband. A more holistic reappraisal of her music has been underway for some time too. Sean Lennon is quoted saying a good number of musicians from his generation always have appreciated and celebrated Ono’s more experimental sounds. As a musician himself, Sean is influenced and inspired by both parents’ work, and he has collaborated with his mother on several occasions.
Gen-X icon Kurt Cobain cited Ono as “the first female punk rocker”, Sheff writes, placing her in a genre where her so-called “screaming” would be a badge of honour, rather than worthy of derision. As a fellow Gen-Xer, I was delighted when, in the early 1990s, I discovered one of my favourite bands, Redd Kross, had helped create a Yoko Ono tribute band of sorts, the Tater Totz – who Sean mentions while discussing his generation’s appreciation of Ono.
This thoughtful, engaging biography prompts readers to put aside their preconceptions and reimagine Ono. It suggests she is a force of nature who has made a significant impact on our culture – for good, rather than ill. The book’s cover serves as a fitting preview: a black-and-white photo of its smiling subject.
Sheff asserts at the beginning that he is not looking to “depict Yoko as either a saint or a sinner”. Nonetheless, he offers a much-needed antidote for the decades of venomous critiques directed her way. Considering the amount of public ridicule that Ono has faced for a good portion of her 92 years, it is important more people have a better understanding of who she is, separating myth from reality.
Sheff’s Yoko works well towards achieving this goal. The book offers a nuanced portrait of both the woman and the artist, while showcasing Ono’s creative work as a form of benevolent magic.
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From Publisher’s Weekly
“An intimate and perceptive portrait” and “illuminating and affectionate biography”
“Bestseller Sheff (Beautiful Boy) aims in this illuminating and affectionate biography to look beyond Yoko Ono’s reputation as an “inscrutable seductress, a manipulating con artist” and a “fraud... who broke up the greatest band in history.” Drawing on extensive conservations with Ono stretching back to 1980, when he first interviewed her and John Lennon, Sheff traces her creative life from an isolated childhood in Tokyo spent drawing and writing to her studies in art, literature, and philosophy at Sarah Lawrence and her first art exhibitions in early 1960s New York City. Along the way, Ono developed an irreverent artistic style that interrogated feminist concerns at a moment of moralizing conservatism, Sheff writes. She and Lennon met when he attended one of her exhibits in 1966. After divorcing their spouses, they married in 1969, and went on to collaborate on such projects as the 1971 song “Imagine” (though Ono went uncredited as cowriter until 2017, an omission Lennon attributed to his own egotism). Sheff adeptly traces the familiar beats of Ono and Lennon’s love story from its earliest days through the fallout following his murder and beyond, while also providing a comprehensive and enriching analysis of Ono’s art career, highlighting in particular how she helped pioneer the notion of art and performance cocreated with an audience. It makes for an intimate and perceptive portrait. (Apr.)”
From Booklist
“An indepth and compelling biography”
“Few public figures have been as maligned and misunderstood as Yoko Ono, an artist most famous for being the wife and creative partner of John Lennon. Sheff (The Buddhist on Death Row, 2020) offers an expansive portrait of Ono as avant-garde artist, vocalist, and peace activist. Sheff interviewed Ono and Lennon in 1980 for Playboy just months before Lennon’s murder. In the aftermath, Sheff and Ono developed a close friendship, which informs this in-depth and compelling biography. It is organized in three parts. The first details Ono’s early life in Japan and New York City and her emergence as an influential artist in the Fluxus collective. Part two describes the vicious misogyny and racism she endured while collaborating with Lennon on such enduring works as Imagine and Plastic Ono Band. Part three describes Ono’s life after Lennon’s death, years marked by grief and betrayal as well as triumph and redemption. Retrospectives of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art provided a reassessment of her extraordinary career, and Yoko continues this movement of deeper appreciation.”
From the New York Times
21 Books Coming in March
YOKO by David Sheff
Sheff first interviewed John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1980, months before the former Beatle was murdered. He and Ono stayed connected; now he’s produced a capacious biography, foregrounding her work as an avant-garde artist and musician and attempting, once and for all, to banish the stereotyping that has shadowed her for decades.
From the Christian Science Monitor
“An engaging and intimate biography”
The 10 best books of March come in like a lion
Yoko: A Biography, by David Sheff
David Sheff was the last journalist to interview Yoko Ono and John Lennon before Lennon’s 1980 murder, and he and Ono subsequently became friends. His engaging and intimate biography provides a full picture of the woman unfairly accused of breaking up the Beatles, highlighting her long, provocative career as an avant-garde artist.
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
by David Sheff
The crisis is well documented and reported: More people are dying of drug overdose than any other non-natural cause—more than from guns, suicide, and car accidents. Politicians have held press conferences, formed commissions and task forces, and convened town-hall meetings. Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General under President Obama (fired by Donald Trump), issued an historic report on America’s drug-use and addiction crises. Pharmaceutical companies have been blamed. Drug cartels. Physicians who hand out pain pills like Skittles.
In the meantime, the problem worsens. In 2015, 52,000 people died because of overdose, including 33,000 on OxyContin, heroin, and other opioids. Almost three times that number died of causes related to the most-used mood-altering addictive drug, alcohol. The 2016 and 2017 overdose numbers are predicted to be higher. Currently, fentanyl deaths are skyrocketing.
If not politicians, to whom can we turn to address the crisis? Since addiction is a health problem, the logical answer would be the addiction-treatment system, but it’s in disarray.
Currently most people who enter treatment are subjected to archaic care, some of which does more harm than good. Only about 10 percent of people who need treatment for drug-use disorders get any whatsoever. Of those who do, a majority enter programs with practices that would be considered barbaric if they were common in treatment systems for other diseases.
Many programs reject science and employ one-size-fits-all-addicts treatment. Patients are often subjected to a slipshod patchwork of unproven therapies. They pass talking sticks and bat horses with Nerf noodles. In some programs, patients are subjected to confrontational therapies, which may include the badgering of those who resist engaging in 12-Step programs, participation in which is required in almost every program. These support groups help some people, but alienate others. When compulsory, they can be detrimental.
Patients are routinely kicked out of programs for exhibiting symptoms of their disease (relapse or breaking rules), which is unconscionable. They are denied life-saving medications by practitioners who don’t believe in them—as Richard Rawson, PhD, research professor, UVM Center for Behavior and Health, says, “this is tantamount to a doctor not believing in Coumadin to prevent heart attacks or insulin for diabetes.”
Patients are put in programs for arbitrary periods of time. Three or five days of detox isn’t treatment. Many residential programs last for twenty-eight days, but research has shown that a month is rarely long enough to treat this disease. Some of those who enter residential treatment do get sober, but they relapse soon after they’re discharged, with, as addiction researcher Thomas McLellan, PhD, sums, “a hearty handshake and instructions to go off to a church basement someplace.” As he says, “It just won't work.” Finally, people afflicted with this disease are almost never assessed and treated for co-occurring psychiatric disorders, in spite of the fact they almost always accompany and underlie life-threatening drug use. If both illnesses aren’t addressed, relapse is likely.
The disastrous state of the system suggests that addiction-medicine specialists don’t know how to treat substance-use disorders (or even if they can be treated). It’s not the case. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and organizations of addiction-care professionals like the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM) and American Association of Addiction Psychiatry (AAAP) have identified effective treatments. There’s no easy cure for many complex diseases, including addiction. However, cognitive-behavior therapy, motivational interviewing, and addiction medications, often used in concert with one another and in concert with assessment and treatment dual diagnoses, are among many proven treatments. However, most patients are never offered these treatments because of a fatal chasm between addiction science and practitioners and programs.
Fixing the system requires modeling it on the one in place for other serious illnesses. Most people enter the medical system in their primary-care doctors’ offices, health clinics, or emergency rooms. Currently, most doctors in these settings have had little or no education about addiction. A recent ASAM survey of two thirds of U.S. medical schools found that they require an average of less than an hour of training in addiction treatment.
Doctors must be taught to recognize substance-use disorders and treat them immediately—the archaic “let them hit bottom” paradigm has been discredited. They should offer or refer for brief interventions. A program called SBIRT (Screening, Brief Intervention and Referral to Treatment), which seeks to identify risky substance use and includes as few as three counseling sessions, has proven effective in many cases, and may be implemented in general healthcare settings.
Primary-care doctors should be trained and certified to prescribe buprenorphine, a medication that decreases craving and prevents overdose on opioids. Currently, there are limitations on the number of patients doctors can treat. Still, in Vermont, for example, almost 50 percent of opioid users in treatment receive care in their doctors’ offices- they don’t have to go to addiction specialists or intensive treatment programs to receive care.
When a patient requires a higher level of care, doctors must refer them to addiction specialists, which excludes many current practitioners whose only qualification to treat addiction is their own experience in recovery. Instead, patients must be seen by psychiatrists and psychologists trained to diagnose and treat the wide range of substance use disorders. There’s a shortage of these doctors; there needs to be a concerted effort to fill the void.
According to Larissa Mooney, MD, director of the UCLA Addiction Medicine Clinic, “Individuals entering treatment should be presented with an informed discussion about treatment options that include effective, research-based interventions. In our current system, treatment recommendations vary widely and may come with bias; medication treatments are either not offered or may be presented as a less desirable option in the path to recovery. Treatment should be individualized, and if the same form of treatment has been repeated over and over with poor results (i.e. relapse), an alternative or more comprehensive approach should be suggested.”
When determining if a patient should be treated in physicians’ offices, intensive-outpatient, or residential setting, doctors should rely on ASAM guidelines, not guesses. The length of treatment must be determined by necessity, not insurance. If a patient relapses, is recalcitrant, or breaks rules, treatment should be reevaluated. They may need a higher level of care, but sick people should never be put out on the street. In addition, all practitioners must reject the archaic proscriptions against medication-assisted treatment; Rawson says that failing to prescribe addiction medications in the case of opioid addiction “should be considered malpractice.”
Programs must also address the fact that a majority of people with substance-use disorders have interrelated psychiatric illnesses. Patients should undergo clinical evaluation, which may include psychological testing. Those with dual diagnoses must be treated for their co-occurring disorders. Finally, initial treatments must be followed by aftercare that’s monitored by an addiction psychiatrist, psychologist, or physician. In short, the field must adopt gold-standard, research-based best practices.
People blame politicians, drug dealers, and pharmaceutical companies for the overdose crisis. However, that won’t help the millions of addicted Americans who need treatment now. Even the most devoted and skilled addiction professionals must acknowledge that they’re part of a broken system that’s killing people. No one can repair it but them.
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To follow on Twitter: @David_Sheff
GUEST ESSAY
My Son Was Addicted and Refused Treatment. We Needed More Options.
By David Sheff
Mr. Sheff is the author of “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction.”
Fifteen years ago, I was the father of a child who was living on the street, addicted to meth, opioids and other drugs. My son was slowly dying.
When he was missing, I scoured neighborhoods where I knew he hung out. Mostly I searched in vain, but I found him a few times and tried to persuade him to enter a treatment program. He was unwilling to get help. He became angry and belligerent. He accused me of trying to control him. He insisted he was fine and said he could stop using on his own if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. Once he was 18, I couldn’t force him. He had to decide for himself — and yet he was in no condition to do so. “I was completely out of my mind, unable to make rational decisions,” he says now.
Most people who are seriously ill want to get better and, if given the opportunity, will choose to be treated. However, addiction can defy logic.
“You can only understand what it’s like to be addicted if you imagine being deprived of air,” a boy addicted to opioids once told me when I visited an adolescent treatment program for book research. “You’ll do anything in order to breathe. You’ll kick, punch, knock down walls. I didn’t want drugs; I needed them — that’s how it felt — and I did whatever it took to get them. I lied, cheated and stole. I would do anything for drugs.”
This is why substance use disorders, if untreated, can lead to criminal behavior, debilitation and — all too often — death. The number of overdose deaths in the United States is higher than ever.
Ideally, people with addiction would seek care. But waiting for a person to choose treatment for a disease that affects rational thought can be catastrophic, now more than ever. The ubiquity and lethality of street drugs such as fentanyl and fentanyl mixed with xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer, mean that many people with substance use disorders are in grave and imminent danger, and most cannot simply quit on their own.
This is excruciating for people with loved ones addicted to drugs. I spent years in abject terror waiting for the phone to ring in the middle of the night, afraid of being told, “Mr. Sheff, we have your son. He didn’t make it.”
In November 2022, when Mayor Eric Adams of New York announced that the city would begin sending people with untreated mental illnesses to hospitals, even against their will, the controversial decision resonated with me. He said the city had a “moral obligation” to help them. I believe that moral obligation extends to people with substance use disorders. I would have wanted someone to intervene with my child on the street using potentially lethal drugs and admit him to a hospital. As unpopular as that decision may be, I would have supported it even if I knew my son had been taken into care against his will.
There’s a common view that people with addiction can’t be helped unless they choose to go into treatment. But the data on voluntary versus coerced and court-mandated treatment is not so clear-cut. Some studies show people don’t need to choose treatment for it to be effective, even though it may be more effective if they choose it willingly.
“The fashionable rhetoric is that mandating people doesn’t work, but evidence points the other way,” says Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and an expert in addiction medicine.
One study he cites, published in The Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment in 2005, followed patients one and five years after voluntary and court-mandated treatment. It concluded that “contrary to popular belief,” when drug users mandated to treatment are compared with people who sought treatment themselves, those who were mandated had similar results related to drug use outcomes and reductions in crime “or sometimes better than those achieved by voluntary patients.” The study also indicated that recognizing they have a problem and being motivated to stop using “may not be necessary for salutary changes to occur, either in the short or longer term.”
Not every expert agrees, and there are also studies questioning the long-term efficacy of compulsory treatment and the risk of potential harms, especially in programs that fall short of standard of care. The data can be difficult to parse because there are many different levels of coercion and ways that people can be pushed into treatment programs — and different treatment protocols when they get there.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse says the evidence for compulsory treatment is mixed. “Creating a climate that encourages and supports people to seek treatment voluntarily and provides access to evidence-based treatment methods is critical,” the group said in a statement. “When that fails to happen, systems and organizations may begin to look to coerced treatment as an alternative.”
To understand whether compulsory treatment works, the institute says, “one must first ask if that treatment is evidence-based and also consider both short-term outcomes like halting drug use and long-term outcomes like staying in recovery.”
I understand why involuntary or coerced treatment is viewed negatively. The approach is part of what brought us the disastrous and counterproductive war on drugs. But with the current state of the drug supply, those who love people with substance use disorders have a difficult choice: Do something, even if it’s deeply unpleasant and may not ultimately work, or risk their loved one’s death.
There are effective ways to get people into treatment who don’t want it. One of the most effective intervention methods is community reinforcement and family training, or CRAFT. Unlike many interventions depicted on television, this approach to encouraging people to get treatment isn’t characterized by blame, threats and ultimatums but by expressions of love, empathy and support. Data suggests that about two-thirds of interventions using CRAFT succeed in getting people into treatment, but it isn’t an option for many people with acute manifestations of addiction, especially for those who are alienated from their families, unemployed or isolated.
When an approach like CRAFT isn’t possible, we need other methods to intervene and encourage people to seek treatment. Health workers should try by reaching out to people wherever they are — on the streets, in encampments for the unhoused, at food banks and at medical clinics where individuals with addiction sometimes go. Mr. Adams recently announced a plan to send more counselors and medical professionals into the streets of New York City.
Another opportunity to intervene is at emergency rooms, syringe exchanges and safe-consumption sites, where they exist. Most are underground. Sites like these are greatly underfunded and technically illegal. We need more of them. Last year, 700 overdoses were reversed at New York’s OnPoint overdose prevention centers, and trained staff members were able to get some people to enter treatment.
There’s also coercion, which worked for my son. He used dangerous drugs for 10 years before he went into a program that finally helped him. He didn’t want to go, but he broke into his mother’s house and was about to be arrested. A sympathetic police officer gave him a choice between rehab or jail. He chose rehab. If he hadn’t been impelled, he says (and I believe), he probably wouldn’t be alive today. There was a time I didn’t think he would make it to 21. He turned 40 this year, after being sober for 11 years.
But not all involuntary treatment needs to be, or should be, mandated by the criminal justice system. We don’t want to wait for people to fall into the criminal justice system before they are helped. People have also been forced to choose between treatment and, for example, being kicked out of the house, being left by a partner or losing a job. In some cases, this type of coercion works, though it can also backfire. If an attempt fails, a person can become even more alienated and recalcitrant.
One of the major problems with involuntary treatment is the poor quality of many programs. Many people forced into treatment are not given evidence-backed care. They are left to painfully detox without access to medications that can make the process easier and likely more effective. They are often not treated with respect. Many are threatened, blamed and badgered. And if people’s experiences are negative, that could make them less likely to try treatment in the future.
Whether they are in an outpatient or a residential program and regardless of how they got there, people with substance use disorders must be cared for by professionals trained in addiction medicine. They must be offered therapies such as cognitive behavioral therapy and contingency management and medications like buprenorphine that prevent overdose and cravings for opioids. Programs should also assess and treat patients for co-occurring psychiatric disorders; at least 40 percent of those with substance use disorders have one or more. This would be a major improvement for most programs, potentially changing the outcomes.
Many people in the traditional recovery world believe that we must wait for people who are addicted to hit bottom, with the hope that they’ll choose to enter treatment. It’s an archaic and dangerous theory. Many people die before they hit bottom. We must intervene, and interventions followed by evidence-based treatment can reverse the downward spiral that often accompanies dangerous drug use. If an intervention doesn’t work the first time, we must try again. And again. Because where there’s life, there’s hope.
David Sheff is the author of “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction.” He founded the Beautiful Boy Fund to make quality, evidence-based care available to people suffering from problems related to drug use and addiction and identify and support research to further the field of addiction medicine.
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A version of this article appears in print on April 14, 2023, Section A, Page 22 of the New York edition with the headline: My Son Was Addicted and Refused Treatment. We Needed More Options.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Kirkus Reviews
THE BUDDHIST ON DEATH ROW
How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place
Author: David Sheff
The “Three Jewels” of Buddhism help an African American man dubiously convicted of a jailhouse murder overcome decades of hellacious abuse inside San Quentin State Prison. Jarvis Jay Masters entered San Quentin State Prison at age 19. One night, four years into a sentence for armed robbery, prison guard Howell Burchfield was stabbed to death on duty inside the penitentiary. Masters steadfastly denied any involvement in the deadly conspiracy but was nevertheless convicted and sentenced to death. In response to his decades long imprisonment on death row—much of it in solitary confinement—Masters turned to an intense study of meditation and Buddhist thought. Those practices not only preserved his life and sanity—they ultimately transformed him from a stunted individual engulfed in anger and self-loathing into a purposeful man of compassion dedicated to uplifting everyone he could. Further directing his anguish and pain to writing, Masters began publishing a voluminous body of illuminating stories and poems that revealed him to be more of a bodhisattva than the death row monster the State of California penal system painted him out to be. An ever widening circle of friends and teachers became convinced of Masters’ innocence, too, and dedicated their own lives to his exoneration. The author would come to know Masters through his writings as well. Applying the same mix of empathy and journalistic integrity demonstrated in Beautiful Boy (2009), Sheff conveys Masters’ transformative jailhouse exchanges with Buddhist masters, family members, and special friends with poignancy and profound emotional power. During one episode, Masters attempts to counsel a young man newly arrived on death row. "When you’re in hell and things can’t get any worse, you can try things you never tried before," he says. "Like trusting people. Looking at yourself. Admitting you’re scared.” An indelible portrait of an incarcerated man finding new life and purpose behind bars.
3/10/2020
BEST BOOKS
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<Starred review>
The Buddhist on Death Row: How One Man Found Light in the Darkest Place
David Sheff. Simon & Schuster, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-1-9821-2845-6
Sheff (Beautiful Boy) draws from research and personal correspondence to tell the stirring story of Jarvis Jay Masters, a convicted murderer awaiting execution on California’s death row who converted to Buddhism and has found a kind of freedom despite the death sentence looming over him. Masters was 19 years old when he was convicted of armed robbery and sent to California’s San Quentin State Prison in 1990. Nine years later, he was convicted of the murder of a prison guard and sentenced to death. After being advised by a criminal investigator working on his case to perform breathing exercises to help with anxiety, Masters became interested in Buddhism. He discovered that practicing the faith allowed him to change the ways he related to himself and to others, and Sheff captures the difficult, powerful realizations Masters gained as a result of his practice (“Buddhism is about how we’re all the same, in this world together, struggling. Life is hard for everyone—we’re all suffering together”), leading him to become a comforting, beneficial presence to his fellow inmates. In an epilogue, Sheff asks readers to consider how one’s perspective can turn a situation of “sadness, pain, and regret” into “light and joy and love.” This Buddhist Dead Man Walking will pull at the heartstrings of any reader. (May}
USA Today
During the campaign, President Trump committed to addressing America’s drug crisis. He called it “a crippling problem” and “a total epidemic,” which it is. An average of 144 people a day die of drug overdoses. Trump promised increased funding and comprehensive Medicaid coverage for treatment. In March, he said, “This is an epidemic that knows no boundaries and shows no mercy, and we will show great compassion and resolve as we work together on this important issue.”
Trump’s rhetoric suggested a continuation of President Obama’s approach, which was founded on a rejection of the failed 45-year-old war on drugs, which treated drug use and addiction mainly as criminal problems. Obama called that war “counterproductive” and an “utter failure.” His administration emphasized treatment-and-prevention programs based on scientific advances that have demonstrated that addiction is a brain disease with biological, psychological and environmental determinants. Obama championed landmark legislation that funded mental health and addiction treatment programs and research. He signed the 21st Century Cures Act and the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, which provides resources for state and community prevention and treatment efforts. A godsend to sufferers of substance-use disorders, Obamacare mandated that insurance plans cover mental health, including addiction care, in parity with other diseases.
The administration made headway toward ending the war-on-drugs approach. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, reversed wartime policies, including draconian mandatory minimum sentencing that filled prisons with people convicted of non-violent drug crimes. His surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, released a historic report — as significant as the 1964 surgeon general’s report on smoking — on alcohol, drugs and health, which made science-based prevention and treatment a national priority. The report is a progressive set of evidence-based policy recommendations for preventing substance use, intervening early in cases of drug misuse, and improving addiction treatment. The recommendations were the result of a 24-month review of the past 30 years of science and policy in this field. In addition, Obama’s recent drug czar, Michael Botticelli, spearheaded a movement that rejected the “failed policies and failed practices” of the past and championed prevention, treatment and harm reduction. For the first time, the drug czar’s budget was tipped in favor of prevention and treatment over interdiction and policing.
Trump’s initial comments regarding addiction appeared to reflect both a personal passion and a sensible policy. However, the president is systematically abandoning the addicted and their families. Last month, Trump abruptly fired Murthy and announced that the odd couple of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Chris Christie will lead an effort to create policies to combat the opioid epidemic.
Fine, but meanwhile, though Trump promised to fund treatment, he has proposed slashing almost $6 billion from health agencies that, among other priorities, address drug use and addiction. He specifically targeted $100 million in block grants for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Of immediate concern to the 20 million Americans meet the diagnostic criteria for the disease of addiction, and the 40 million regularly misusing alcohol and other drugswho are at risk and may require some form of treatment, the president has said that one way or another he’ll end mandates included in the Affordable Care Act.
Trump has said that he’d sign the bill the House passed Thursday that will, if it makes it through the Senate, do just that by allowing states to apply for waivers of ACA-required benefits, including mental health and addiction care. Without that mandated coverage, it’s likely that millions of Americans will lose coverage for an illness that could kill them.
Meanwhile, Trump’s team has begun a re-escalation of the drug war. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an old-school drug warrior, criticized Holder’s policies and suggested that he’ll reverse them. “You have to able to arrest people and then you’re intervening in their destructive habit,” Sessions said. “Many people never ever recover from addiction — except by the grave.”
They would recover if they had proper treatment.
t’s unsurprising that an administration that has vowed to be tough on crime plans to use battering rams rather than science-based public health efforts — ignoring evidence that the former doesn’t work and that the latter does. In the past, tough on crime was a boon to the prison system, which is filled with hundreds of thousands of people incarcerated for non-violent drug crimes. Any policy that throws sick people in prison is inhumane, never mind counterproductive.
And how about killing them? Doubts about Trump’s compassion toward the addicted were confirmed last weekend when he cozied up to a dictator whose idea of treating drug users is murdering them. According to USA TODAY, his new friend, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, had at least 6,000 people killed for drug crimes in six months. Duterte doesn’t distinguish between users and dealers. He has exhorted Philippine citizens: “If you know any addicts, go ahead and kill them.”
It’s critical that the Trump administration reverse directions and focus on a public health approach. Science has demonstrated that addiction isn’t a choice made by people without willpower who only care about getting high, no matter the impact on society, their loved ones and themselves. It’s a brain disease. We punish people who make bad choices. But people who are ill don’t need censure, stigmatization or jail time. They need quality care for an illness that can, if it isn’t treated, kill them.
David Sheff is the author of Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction, and Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy. Follow him on Twitter: @david_sheff
This review by Mick Sussman was published in The New York Times.
It must be the purest agony to be the parent of a child succumbing to drug addiction. David Sheff’s previous book was an account of his son Nic’s descent from a thoughtful boy to a sullen pothead to a self-destructive methamphetamine fiend, and of his own tormented and bewildered reaction.
If that book, “Beautiful Boy,” was a cry of despair, “Clean” is intended as an objective, if still impassioned, examination of the research on prevention and treatment — a guide for those affected by addiction but also a manifesto aimed at clinical professionals and policy makers. Sheff’s premise is that “addiction isn’t a criminal problem, but a health problem,” and that the rigor of medicine is the antidote to the irrational responses, familial and social, that addiction tends to set off.
Sheff, a journalist, writes that America’s “stigmatization of drug users” has backfired, hindering progress in curbing addiction. The war on drugs, he says bluntly, “has failed.” After 40 years and an “unconscionable” expense that he estimates at a trillion dollars, there are 20 million addicts in America (including alcoholics), and “more drugs, more kinds of drugs, and more toxic drugs used at younger ages.”
Sheff says that drug addiction is a disease as defined by Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, since it causes “anatomic alterations” to the brain that result in “cognitive deficits” and other symptoms. But isn’t drug use an act of free will, distinguishing addiction from other diseases? Sheff responds that behavioral choices contribute to many illnesses: think of unhealthy diets and diabetes.
Like other diseases, addiction has a substantial genetic component. Mental illness and poverty are major risk factors. These susceptibilities help explain why 80 percent of adolescents in the United States try drugs, but only 10 percent become addicted. Sheff emphasizes the vulnerability of adolescents. Neuroscience corroborates our intuition that their impulsivity develops faster than their inhibitions, and drugs may stunt their emotional growth, making them yet more prone to addiction.
Although the medical approach to drug abuse has yielded techniques with proven effectiveness (Sheff’s touchstone is “evidence-based treatment”), he is scrupulous about not overselling it. “Addiction medicine isn’t an exact science,” he concedes, “and it’s still a relatively new one.” Treatment programs have success rates that are only comparatively less dismal than doing nothing. Just a small minority — even the claim of 30 percent may be inflated — of addicts who have been treated remain sober for a year. “The persistent possibility of relapse,” he says, is a “hallmark of addiction,” which he calls a chronic disease requiring lifelong vigilance. He laments the variable quality of treatment programs. Even in some expensive clinics, medical professionals are scarce, and the worst programs border on “voodoo.”
Sheff may lose some readers as he sprints through the research for every aspect (neuroscience, social science, psychology, law) of every stage (preventing early use, identifying abuse, detox, treating addiction, maintaining sobriety) of every drug problem. Though leavened by profiles of addicts and their healers, “Clean” feels overstuffed and miscellaneous, in the same way that a 300-page overview of everything we know about cancer would.
Nevertheless, Sheff is a skilled journalist on an urgent mission. He prevailed over the anger and hopelessness he felt at his son’s affliction by calling upon great reserves of love and discipline to investigate what might help — first as a father and then, in this book, as a reporter and an advocate. His forbearance and clearheadedness could serve as an example for America as it confronts its drug problem. He has performed a vital service by compiling sensible advice on a subject for which sensible advice is in short supply.
An excerpt of the review by Abigail ZugerR, M.D. in The New York Times.
“Beautiful Boy” was a page turner, a dark fable that spoke to worried parents everywhere. “Clean” is a reference work and a manifesto, an annotated map of the same frightening territory where dragons still lurk at the edges.
In “Clean,” Mr. Sheff changes perspective, writing as advocate and journalist rather than distraught father. Still, his story line recreates that of “Beautiful Boy,” tracing the trajectory of addiction from cradle to rehab and beyond with the same question in mind: How does a promising cleareyed kid from a good family wind up in an inconceivable sea of trouble?
His answer, bludgeoned home with the repetitive eloquence of the missionary, is entirely straightforward: The child is ill. Addiction must be considered a disease, as devoid of moral overtones as diabetes or coronary artery disease, just as amenable as they are to scientific analysis, and just as treatable with data-supported interventions, not hope, prayer or hocus-pocus.
This perspective is easy enough to articulate but very difficult to sustain — hence Mr. Sheff’s determined reiterations. The symptoms of this particular relapsing illness, after all, include deceit, denial and the betrayal of near and dear. Cardiac patients stop to rest halfway up a flight of stairs not because they want to, but because they have to. Similarly, addicts lie and steal, over and over again, not because they want to but because they must.
Wrapping the mind around this formulation requires an enormous act of will, and it is Mr. Sheff’s foremost achievement that his arguments are likely to influence even the angriest and most judgmental reader.
David Sheff is receiving the ASAM 2017 Media Award to recognize a person or entity that improves the public’s understanding of addiction, addiction treatment, recovery, or the profession of addiction medicine through the use of a media or publication source.
http://www.asam.org/education/live-online-cme/the-asam-annual-conference/program-schedule/annual-awards-luncheon
David Sheff is awarded the 2013 Media Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence/National Institute on Drug Abuse Media Award (CPDD/NIDA).
by David Sheff
The artist Ai Weiwei is the Chinese government’s worst nightmare: an internationally revered art star who uses his work and celebrity to advocate for democracy and free speech in a nation with neither. The government has employed a draconian campaign to silence him. Ai is under constant surveillance. He has been threatened, placed under house arrest and physically attacked by a police officer. Ai’s incendiary blog, read by thousands of Chinese citizens, disappeared one day. And so did he: In 2011, state police grabbed him at the airport, threw a black bag over his head and drove him to an undisclosed location, where he languished for 81 days in a tiny prison cell. Despite these attacks, Ai has continued his virulent criticism of the Chinese Communist leadership, which he deems repressive, immoral and illegitimate.
Article by Susan Gonzalez was published in the Yale News
There was a time early in his son’s addiction to methamphetamines and heroin that David Sheff reacted with disbelief when told that addiction is a disease.
“My son isn’t ill,” the freelance journalist and author recalled thinking. “He’s a selfish, reckless, remorseless, narcissistic teenager obsessed with being high.”
The first time he forced Nic into treatment, said Sheff, the youngster tried to kick out the car window in an effort to escape.
Sheff — author of the bestselling “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction” and the subsequent (and also bestselling) “Clean: Addressing Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy” — recounted some of his journey before a packed audience during a psychiatry grand rounds lecture in the auditorium of 55 Park St. His talk, co-sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship, was also the Department of Psychiatry’s annual Ribicoff Lecture.
Today, following a decade of personal experience and years of journalistic research, Sheff is convinced that addiction is, in fact, an illness, and believes that it cannot be prevented and successfully treated until that fact is commonly accepted and understood. He said the addict should be treated with as much compassion as someone with cancer or any other disease.
During his talk, Sheff recounted the “years of hell” that he and his family lived through while watching Nic “descend” deeper into addiction and relapse “time after time after time.” His life, the journalist said, was a rollercoaster of despair, hope, and fear. Every time his phone rang, he wondered if it would be the call from police announcing that Nic was dead. In the throes of drug use, Nic would disappear so often that the local police dispatcher became accustomed to Sheff’s phone calls asking if there was any news of his son, and once suggested that the father try calling the morgue.
Since writing “Beautiful Boy,” Sheff said he was received thousands of letters from parents who have been through the same anguish. He realized that his family “was one of the lucky ones,” he told his audience. Nic, now 31, is celebrating his fifth year in recovery.
His own investigation into the causes and treatment of addiction led Sheff to visit research laboratories, clinicians, drug treatment centers, crack houses, emergency rooms, 12-step programs, needle exchange programs, and prisons. What he learned convinced him that addiction is a neurological and genetic disease.
Scans of addicts’ brains, he noted, show “startling” anatomical and structural differences. He also cited work being done by Ulrike Heberlein at the University of California-San Francisco with fruit flies, which has demonstrated that cravings for drugs “trump basic survival instincts.” The addicted flies would repeatedly suffer electric shock to obtain alcohol or cocaine.
Recognizing addiction as an illness is the first step toward solving the public health tragedy, Sheff told his audience. He noted that addiction is the number-three cause of death in America, killing 350 people daily.
“We are losing one person every 19 minutes — after cancer and heart-related deaths,” said Sheff, who argued that greater attention must be paid to understanding and treating addiction.
The journalist acknowledged that it will take a “culture shift” to change people’s thoughts about addicts, noting that most believe drug abusers have a choice over whether or not to use drugs. Sheff said that one in 10 of the 80% of people who try drugs before the age of 18 become addicts.
“People are threatened … [T]hey don’t want to accept that sometimes behavior is not in our control. Our culture emphasizes self-determination and willpower,” he said. “We want to be masters of our own destiny, but sometimes we aren’t.”
He advocated for education about addiction — not only for the public but also for physicians, most of whom are not trained to identify or treat addiction, Sheff claimed. Since drug use commonly begins in the teenage years, pediatricians are among those who should be well trained, he said.
Asked why they take drugs, most youngsters cite stress as the biggest factor, Sheff said, and thus treating that is key to preventing drug or alcohol abuse.
“We can only help [end addiction] when we stop focusing on the drugs themselves and focus on why people use them,” said Sheff, adding, “Stress is related to addiction on the most primal level.”
He said that genetics and psychological disorders — including anxiety, bipolar disorder, depression, and trauma — are also contributing factors.
“It’s useless to tell the child who is being bullied or failing in school, or who is being traumatized by family turmoil, to ‘Just say no,’” maintained Sheff. “It’s pointless to tell our children to make good choices about drugs if they offer them a reprieve from the darkness they feel or the connection that they so badly crave. People in pain are desperate for relief.”
Sheff recounted how some of the “treatments” his own son had were punitive rather than compassionate. For bad behavior at one facility, Nic had to cut the grass with scissors and clean grout with a toothbrush.
Sheff said 12-step programs also may fail with teenagers, as “what 17-year-old admits he is powerless about anything or turns his life over to another person?”
The journalist decried the hesitancy of some drug therapists to prescribe medications such as suboxone (or buprenorphine) for opioid dependence because they don’t want to treat drug dependence with other drugs. Scientific evidence has shown that such medications can be beneficial, said Sheff, arguing that addiction treatment must be evidence based.
In Nic’s case, Sheff noted, it took years before a doctor conducted psychological testing that revealed his son suffered from bipolar disorder and depression. Previous treatments might have been more successful had he been diagnosed earlier, Sheff suggested.
While some discouraged Sheff from writing about his family’s experience of addiction, the author said the response he has received since the publication of his books has been wholly positive and empathetic. He said that stigma is “the single biggest roadblock” to treatment and an understanding of addiction.
“We don’t know how pervasive addiction is because addicts and families already keep it secret,” he said, later adding: “When we choose to no longer hide our own or our child’s addiction, we can feel tremendous relief … We can learn we are not alone.”
Sheff said that he is hopeful about the future, in part because President Obama’s Affordable Care Act requires mental illness, including addiction, to be treated the same as physical illness, and insurance can now fully cover addiction treatment. Some best practices in the treatment of addiction are being established, and the families of addicts have started some grassroots movements, much the same way AIDs activists did in the 1980s, Sheff said.
“I’m hopeful because of people like you in this room,” concluded Sheff, referring to the Yale doctors and researchers who are actively engaged in trying to better understand and treat addictions.
Sheff was introduced by Dr. Robert Malison, professor of psychiatry and director of the Clinical Neuroscience Research Unit and the Neuroscience Research Training Program, as well as chief of the Cocaine Research Clinic. He called Sheff’s books about addiction “a testament to a father’s love for his son,” and added, “We are working our hardest to make good on what you, David, would like to see realized.”
Best-selling @nytimes author @david_sheff spoke to NIDA scientists and staff today about his work on #addiction. twitter.com/NIDAnews/statu…
— NIDAnews (@NIDAnews)
This article by David Sheff was originally published at The New York Times.
PARENTS of drug-addicted kids learn the hard way that when we think things can’t get worse, they do. As a teenager, my son, Nic, was addicted to methamphetamine, heroin and other drugs. At 20, he had used most of the illicit drugs known to man. But one night, partying with a couple of friends in his basement apartment in Brooklyn, the combination and volume caused him to overdose. One of his friends called 911.
Nic was rushed to the emergency room, where he was resuscitated. When I spoke to a doctor there, I was told that if another 15 minutes had passed before Nic got to the E.R., he wouldn’t have survived. My son has now been sober for five years. I don’t know who called the paramedics, but not a day goes by when I don’t thank him.
Other parents haven’t been so lucky.
So many of the stories I’ve heard, from parents who have read my accounts of Nic’s addiction, begin the same way. He was a wonderful child, a good student. She was popular, a hard worker.
David C. Humes described his son Greg as “Wonderful and bright. A.P. courses, good athlete. Warm. Loving.” On May 19, 2012, “Greg’s earthly story ends,” David told me. His son overdosed and passed out. Someone — David doesn’t know who — dragged Greg outside and placed him in the back seat of his own car. The person then drove Greg to the hospital and left him in the parking lot, where he was found dead.
A few days ago I heard from another father. He told me about his only child, Steve, who overdosed on a combination of OxyContin and Jack Daniel’s. Steve’s friends — “friends” may not be the appropriate word — put him in an ice-filled bathtub, a misguided intervention they had seen on TV. Steve died. His friends didn’t call for help because they were afraid they would be arrested, and they probably would have been.
These children are among many thousands whose lives may have been saved if someone had called for help, and more are dying every day. There’s no reliable data on the number of overdose deaths that could have been prevented had help been summoned immediately. But research suggests that, among those who witness an overdose, the most common reason people don’t call for help is the fear of being arrested.
Meanwhile, the death toll keeps rising. Rates of lethal overdoses — now mostly with prescription opioid pain medications, like OxyContin, and street drugs like heroin — have more than tripled since 1990, leading to over 38,000 deaths in the United States in 2010. Overdose has become the No. 1 nonnatural cause of death in the country.
Responding to this epidemic, 11 states — including North Carolina earlier this month — and the District of Columbia have enacted laws that encourage people to intervene at the scene of a drug overdose. These laws, generally, shield a person who calls 911 from arrest and prosecution for drug use or possession, underage alcohol use and similar crimes. (A few other states offer weaker protections for 911 callers in overdose cases, and many already have so-called “Good Samaritan” laws that protect people from being sued if they are at the scene of a non-drug-related accident and try to help.)
The law that recently took effect in the District of Columbia is among the more comprehensive of the statutes — preventing evidence from being used against a person who called emergency services “if it was found through the process of providing health care.” The law also ensures that a person who calls 911 can’t be arrested, in connection with that call, for a parole violation, and protects people who themselves are OD’ing if they call for help.
Such legislation, of course, won’t touch the problem of addiction; nor will it prevent every death from overdose. But it will save lives.
That message had been lost on Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who “conditionally vetoed” a similar measure last year after it passed the state legislature with bipartisan support, saying it would have let drug dealers “off the hook.”
“How about if the person calling is not a Good Samaritan?” Mr. Christie asked at the time of his veto.
Fortunately, in the months since, Mr. Christie appears to have had a change of heart, thanks to lobbying by parents whose children have died from overdoses. Today, Mr. Christie is expected to announce his support of an “Overdose Prevention Act” that includes a Good Samaritan provision. Should the law pass in New Jersey, that would still leave more than three dozen states without protections for those who call 911 in OD cases.
One state on that list is Pennsylvania, where David Humes’s son died. “If they had this law,” says Mr. Humes, “maybe it would have saved my boy’s life.”
David Sheff is the author, most recently, of “Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy.”
Article by David Sheff originally appeared on Medium.
When my teenage son was raging out of control on drugs — wasted on crystal meth and heroin, careening toward death — I finally got him into treatment, the first of a dozen rehab programs he would go to. This program included lectures for family members, like one titled “The Disease of Addiction.” By then Nic had lied to me, broken into our home, and stolen from me — and even from his little brother, too. I thought I’d raised a kind, moral, and loving child, but something had gone horribly wrong. As I listened to the speaker talk about addiction as a disease, Nic was in a lockdown ward in a wing of the hospital. Getting him there had been hell — he almost leaped out of our moving car and had tried to kick out the window. My son wasn’t ill. He was selfish, reckless, and remorseless, a narcissistic teenager obsessed with being high, with no concern for his family.That was the first time I heard what is sometimes termed “the disease theory” of addiction, but it wasn’t the last. I tell about my struggle to understand that addiction is a disease in my book Beautiful Boy, about about my family’s struggle when Nic became addicted. The disease theory was repeated in more lectures at more rehabs, in countless therapists’ offices, and in many Twelve Step meetings I attended. I’d become enraged by it. People with leukemia have a disease. Those with Alzheimer’s or lymphoma have a disease. Nic was choosing to use and could stop if he wanted to. There was no such option for cancer patients.
Meanwhile, I struggled to make sense of what had happened to my son.
My perplexity, not to mention my fear, led me to spend the next ten years investigating this thing called addiction. I wanted to confirm my view about espousers of the disease theory, that they were looking for an excuse for addicts’ appalling behavior.
As I report in my latest book, Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy, a disease, according to Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, is “an interruption, cessation, or disorder of a body, system, or organ structure or function” and “a morbid entity ordinarily characterized by two or more of the following criteria: recognized etiologic agent(s), identifiable group of signs and symptoms, or consistent anatomic alterations.”
In researchers’ laboratories, I was shown scans of addicts’ brains compared with ones of “normal” brains that showed startling differences in the ways they functioned. Researchers showed how the brains of addicts responded to drugs differently than did nonaddicts’ brains. They explained the consistent anatomic aberrations found in the brain structure of addicts and the disruption they had of the normal flow of neurotransmitters through the nervous system. I was informed about research that demonstrated that addicts’ brains were different even before they took drugs and given incontrovertible evidence of genetic components of addiction.
I also learned about functional differences in addicts’ brains and common symptoms associated with addiction. Over time, addicts’ neurological systems build up a tolerance to a given drug. Because they become physically dependent on the drug, they experience withdrawal symptoms, some potentially lethal, when they’re deprived of the drug. Craving and associated drug-seeking behavior are other typical symptoms. All of these symptoms are caused by biology, not choice. Impairments include a range of cognitive deficits and compromised motor functions. There are measurable anomalies related to autonomic body functions.
Over time I became convinced. The evidence was undeniable. Addiction is a disease, but a unique disease because of the associated behavior. And it’s unique because it appears that people choose it.
People do choose to use drugs — at first. Nic chose to get high, but so do most other children. Before they are eighteen, 80 percent of our kids do. Most of them stop or continue to use in moderation, but some, about one out of ten, become addicted. Like Nic. He was twelve when he smoked pot for the first time. His use quickly escalated, and by the time he was eighteen, he was addicted to it. Nic didn’t choose to become addicted. No one does. Once addicted, sufferers of the disease continue to use in spite of a desire, at some point desperation, to stop. Often they repeatedly try to stop, but they can’t. Addicts’ brains are different than others’. This is a disease that impairs the parts of the brain that would normally cause people to control their impulses.
My son was ill — seriously ill. The disease of addiction is chronic and progressive. If it isn’t treated, it can be fatal. It became clear to me: Nic could die of this disease.
I’ve heard some people say that addiction shouldn’t be considered a disease because a diagnosis would discourage addicts and their families, as if it were a sentence that would doom them. But I was relieved when I understood that Nic was ill. Nic’s unconscionable behavior made sense. I heard addicts describe the need for drugs as as powerful as the need for oxygen. Deprive a person of oxygen, and he will kick, scratch, and fight for more. Deprive an addict of drugs, and he will lie, steal, and do other irrational things — whatever it takes — to get more. The diagnosis was also a relief to Nic, who’d been as mystified as I was by behavior of his that he, too, found inexplicable.
I gathered my research in Clean. The book considers the social, political, biological, health, behavioral, and other aspects, including the consequences, of the disease of addiction. One of my goals for the book was to once and for all prove to skeptics that addiction is a disease. It wasn’t merely an intellectual exercise. I came to understand that people must know that addicts are ill if our society is ever going to solve the myriad problems associated with addiction, which is now the number-three killer in America, costing the nation $425 billion for health care, criminal justice, and lost productivity.
Clean was published in April of this year. I braced myself for attacks about some of the stands I take in the book. I expected some readers and special-interest groups to vehemently disagree with my positions on marijuana legalization and the war on drugs. (I concluded that marijuana, though dangerous for adolescents, should be legalized and that the war on drugs had failed and should be ended.) I expected some drug-treatment professionals to attack conclusions I’d made about, for example, the dangerous constructs of “hitting bottom” and cold-turkey detox (they potentially lead to death and should be rejected) or the usefulness of pharmacology in the treatment of some addictions (contrary to the adamant view of some, you do treat some drug problems with drugs). But those subjects turned out to be far less contentious than my attempt to prove that addiction is a disease.
Recently, my friend Mike Moritz, chairman of Sequoia Capital, wrotean article called “Why Is Addiction Still Considered a Personal Weakness?” tackling the subject. “When we hear about someone with a heart problem, HIV, cancer or diabetes we conclude they are ill,” Mortiz wrote. “If we encounter people whose throats close when they eat peanuts or require epinephrine shots if they mistakenly eat shellfish, we understand there are aspects of their genetic wiring that make them susceptible. Yet when we hear about someone with a drug or alcohol problem, they are all too easily dismissed as weak, self-indulgent, indolent, sinful, narcissistic, debauched and feeble failures. Why don’t we assume that drug and alcohol addicts are ill and often seriously and chronically sick?”
Many people were vitriolic in their responses to both his article and my book. Their vehemence and anger caught me off guard. A man wrote, “I have no sympathy for people who make bad choices, and that’s what addicts do. They’re derelict and must be treated as such.”
“I don’t want my tax dollars or insurance premiums or whatever else wasted on other people’s bad choices,” another responded. “The label of ‘disease’ for drug addictions evokes way too much sympathy from people, and thus is misleading. And it is THAT which I cannot stand.”
Yet another: “It’s simple. People make choices in their lives. They make good or bad choices. Their choices are informed by their consciences or lack thereof. Addicts have chosen their own pleasure over everything and everyone. I have no sympathy.”
And more:
“You can make the decision to use drugs or not to. That’s called will power. Some people have no will power.”
“Addiction to substances such as narcotics, alcohol, nicotine, or others is … a choice or lack of will to change.”
“It’s a personal weakness.”
“I’m sick of this ‘oh, poor addicts, they have a disease.’ Addicts just like being high more than they like being sober. They don’t care about the consequences of this choice, which is why they’re reprehensible.”
I realized that if my goal now was to convince people that addiction is a disease, I had my work cut out for me. I learned that I’m taking on deeply rooted prejudices. For some people, the bias is grounded in a belief that if addicts were seen as ill, they’d be off the hook for the choices they made, including reprehensible behavior — violence, or unconscionable actions that break up families and send some addicts to prison. I also determined that the intense reaction comes because people are threatened. They don’t want to accept that sometimes our behavior is not in our control. Our culture emphasizes self-determination and willpower. We want to be the masters of our own destiny.
But sometimes we aren’t.
No matter why people respond to the idea with such vehemence, addiction is a disease — a brain disease.
Why does it matter so much what people think? It matters because we judge and punish people who make bad choices. We demand of them confession and contrition. On the contrary, when people are ill, we treat them with compassion, and the course forward is clearer. People who are ill don’t need blame, chastisement, or punishment — they need treatment.
Interview with Judy Woodruff – PBS Newshour.
It has been more than 40 years since Richard Nixon called for a “war on drugs,” and yet our prevention and treatment efforts have largely failed to address the chronic illness of substance addiction that afflicts one in 12 Americans and affects millions more friends and family members.
Journalist David Sheff’s son Nic began using marijuana and alcohol at the age of 12, then heroine and crystal meth. Sheff was baffled; his son transformed from an intelligent student and athlete into an addict living on the streets. At first he thought Nic was just being a wild teenager who needed some tough love. But after struggling to find Nic treatment — and keep him alive — Sheff realized that his son was dealing with a serious disease, more similar than different from diabetes, hypertension or even cancer.
With his personal experience and more than 10 years of research, Sheff concluded that addiction is a health crisis with a price tag of $600 billion nn combined medical, economic, criminal and social costs every year.
In a follow-up to his memoir “Beautiful Boy,” David Sheff has written a new book, “Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy,” in order to outline a slew of reasons why society and addiction treatments have largely failed to help the 20 million Americans with addictions.
Sheff asserts that the reason that addiction treatments overwhelmingly fail is because of how we view addiction. And he says correcting common misconceptions about the disease can be the first step towards improving the social support and medical treatment systems for those struggling with their addictions.
Below are the top myths about addiction, according to David Sheff. Do you agree or disagree? Let PBS NewsHour know what you think by leaving your comments in the discussion section at the bottom of the page.
Myth No. 1: Good kids don’t use drugs, bad kids do.
As our children grow up, we — parents, teachers, the culture as a whole — tell them that good kids abstain, bad ones use. Yet 80 percent of America’s children will at least try alcohol or other drugs. Do we really believe that most of our children are bad? As a pediatrician told me: “These aren’t bad kids. They’re our kids.”
By moralizing the choice to use or not, we’re alienating our kids. This isn’t a question of good and bad, it’s a question of health and safety. If we keep this in mind, we can better help our kids grow up without succumbing to drugs and continuing to use, trying new and more dangerous drugs, and even become addicted.
Myth No. 2: It’s impossible to prevent drug use. Kids who are going to use are going to use.
We’ve failed to prevent use because we’ve done most things wrong by focusing on drugs as a criminal and moral problem, and on scare tactics and hyperbole. Prevention efforts will be effective when we focus not on “just say no” tactics, but instead address the reasons kids use.
Kids who have drug problems often use drugs as a way to alleviate stress and otherwise help them cope with stressful lives. Kids who experienced trauma are more likely to have drug problems. The list of risk factors goes on: those growing up in poverty or violent neighborhoods, children whose parents divorce or suffer loss, those with addiction, including alcoholism, in their family, young people with ADHD, with learning disabilities, with a host of psychological disorders including depression and bipolar disorder.
We’ll effectively lower or potentially prevent drug use when we address these risk factors and replace them with protective factors.
Myth No. 3: People who get addicted are weak and without morals.
Addiction is a disease. This isn’t about character. People who think that addicts are weak assume that will power is enough for a person to stop using.
So if weakness isn’t the reason why, when someone’s life is negatively affected by their drug use, why don’t they just stop? It’s because their brains have altered so the new “normal” is the presence of drugs.
Dependence is real, not a choice, biologically rooted, and therefore addicts must be treated. It’s critical that people understand that addiction is a serious illness, usually chronic and progressive and often fatal. Addiction is the cause for 120,000 deaths each year.
Myth No. 4: Addicts must hit bottom before they can be treated.
This myth kills addicts. Don’t wait for an addict to hit bottom; do everything you can to get them into treatments. Addicts are often told that they must hit bottom, but they need to know that people who enter treatment can and do get well. Many people die before they hit a bottom. We must reject this archaic belief.
Myth No. 5: You don’t treat drug problems with drugs.
Wrong again. Many addiction treatments can and should include medication. A variety of medications, when prescribed, monitored, and adjusted by a good psychiatrist, in combination with behavioral therapies, dramatically up the odds of successful treatment.
For many addicts, the impact of medications can be profound — even lifesaving. And for addicts with concurrent mental illnesses, drugs can be essential. Some of the same medications that help during detox can be part of primary care. Some of these prescriptions inhibit cravings. Some treat the symptoms that come with sobriety following intense and consistent drug use. Some replacement drugs not only reduce cravings but act as deterrents; they block certain drugs from attaching to receptors, thereby preventing the drugs from triggering a high if they’re taken. In addition, medications can treat the concurrent and underlying problems, including anxiety, depression, and other disorders, that contribute to addiction.
Myth No. 6: The only way for addicts to stop using is by going to AA meetings.
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and the Twelve Steps have helped countless addicts get and stay sober. It’s a profound program that works for many people. But it doesn’t work for a majority of addicts.
People must know that there are other treatments that are effective. Some are used in concert with AA, but AA isn’t a requirement to managing addiction. When treatment programs insist that patients must practice the Steps, they can alienate some addicts, often teenagers.
Effective programs should offer many types of treatment, including behavioral and psychological treatments. As I said, some addictions should be treated with medication in addition to behavioral treatments.
Myth No. 7: Marijuana is not addictive. No one’s ever died from marijuana. It’s not a gateway drug. Marijuana shouldn’t be legalized.
Marijuana should be legalized, but not because it’s safe, especially for teenagers and young adults. It should be legalized because we must treat marijuana use like all drug use — as a health issue. The fact that it is illegal just drives using marijuana underground. The last thing we want to do is increase those things by kicking kids out of school or throwing them into the criminal justice system because they were caught smoking pot.
But those who support legalization by saying that pot is harmless — “it’s natural, innocuous” — are also wrong. Marijuana is dangerous for kids. Part of the reason is that their brains are developing during adolescence and early adulthood. Drugs impede and alter the brain development, and these changes can harm cognition and memory, and can impede kids’ emotional maturation.
Marijuana is a gateway drug for some kids who smoke; I’ve never met an addict who started on heroin — it’s always pot and drinking. And marijuana is addictive for about 7 percent of those who try it. Yes, people don’t overdose and die from smoking pot, but those who drive while high are twice as likely to get in car accidents, including ones that are fatal.
Myth No. 8: America’s drug problem is unsolvable.
We’ve failed at solving America’s drug problem not because it’s impossible to do so, but we’ve been focusing on the wrong things. The main problem is that we’ve treated drug use as a criminal problem and drug users as morally bankrupt.
There are several developments that make me optimistic that we can lower drug use, treat addicts and potentially solve many of the problems in America caused by addiction:
The top myths about addiction above were adapted from content from David Sheff’s new book, “Clean: Overcoming Addiction and Ending America’s Greatest Tragedy.
Interview with MSNBC’s The Cycle
While helping his son battle addiction, David Sheff explains to The Cycle hosts that when it comes to how we view and treat drug addiction, we’re stuck in the past.
