From addiction to online-magazine writing

What happens when a well-off kid survives a bout (or several) with hard drugs?

"Nick is working and writing a children's book and articles and movie reviews for an online magazine."

Somehow this looks familiar. Slate writer Seth Mnookin went down a similar road, and also lived to write for an online magazine. As someone who aspires to write for magazines, both online and off, I find this a bit disturbing. It's not that those who've had drug problems shouldn't be permitted to have writing careers, but at a certain point there's this sense that the past drug problem is supposed to make the writer more interesting, that it adds a certain amount of street cred to a Berkeley- (Nick) or Harvard- (Mnookin) educated son of privilege. Reihan was right about the class issues at stake here: a middle-class young man who starts with pot at 12 and follows the predictable course of someone who gets started that early doesn't always end up getting sent to a liberal arts college on the East Coast (and why oh why did he have to go to Hampshire if he already had a drug problem!) and then, as a working, sober adult, immediately assume he deserves a creative profession. But if your father is David Sheff, NYT Magazine writer, convinced that you "had always been a sensitive, sagacious, joyful and exceptionally bright child", then if you don't self-destruct, you'll do just fine. This is unfair--the tragedy of Nick is in part that he has an addiction, but is also that he got a gazillion second chances, while many others with his predilictions get none.

Part of the problem, in Nick's case, seems to be that hippie parents raising hippie kids can't really expect their offspring all to be straight-edge Saffies. When parents themselves clearly value experimentation, whether with substances or with multiple marriages, they're unlikely to produce kids who get their kicks from books and CSPAN (or trips to the mall and diet Coke) alone. Sheff's piece practically demands that conservatives say, "I told you so," in that the constant personal-fulfillment-seeking father, who needs the happiest possible marriage (and will scrap one with the mother of his young son) and the happiest possible life for that son (which involves sending the drug-addled kid to a hippie college), will end up screwing over his entire family. It is un-PC to say that an unhappy couple should stay married, that a troubled child should be forced to attend a stricter, more traditional school and not an open-minded liberal arts school, but Sheff himself sort of gets that his own self-indulgence played a role in his son's drug problem.

But it's clear that well-to-do Blue State parents aren't solely responsible for drug addiction in America, and that plenty of notable conservatives have gotten hooked on various substances. If done properly, liberal parents can raise children with the "valueless" values of experimentation and self-fulfillment, take them to avant-garde plays and not to religious services, and still feel relatively confident that meth addiction will not result. Parents looking to raise children in this manner would be fine with their kid bringing home a significant other of the same sex, but would give the kid hell if he came home high.