Beautiful Boy and Tweak

Reading two different accounts of the story of a drug addict allows much room for comparison between the two. In the case of David and Nic Sheff’s books, I was surprised at how much similarity there was between the two; they agreed on most points and there was no striking discontinuity in their stories. There is, however, a significant difference in the perspectives from which the two are told. Naturally, Nic, as the addict son, takes on a more self-centered view. In David’s book it is clear that Nic’s addiction is the one central driving force in their family life, especially in David’s daily life. In Nic’s book, however, his relationship with his father and the rest of his family is only one of the several focal points of the book; Nic is also preoccupied with girlfriends, friends, and his sponsor. David Sheff’s book is a very self-reflecting account. He is constantly analyzing the past, the decisions he’s made with Nic, and putting it all together in a desperate attempt to find answers to his son’s downfall. He struggles with a constant mental conflict: “What did I do wrong?” His preoccupation with Nic became an addiction in itself, and the obsessive worry and stress took a tremendous toll, to the point where he suffered from a massive hemorrhage. David’s view of the progression of Nic’s addiction reflects the Social Learning Theories and Psychoanalytical explanations of American drug use. At first, David views the onset of Nic’s addiction as a cause of some childhood lifestyle factors he lived through (such as the divorce). Later on, however, David realizes that there are thousands of teenagers who are reeled into the dark world of drugs and do not necessarily come from traumatic backgrounds; that these two things are not always directly linked. They are simply reinforced by others, usually drug-using friends, regardless of how they were raised. Ronald Akers built on this idea of operant conditioning by pointing out that drug-using behavior is reinforced