‘Beautiful Boy’ Captures the Stark Reality of Addiction
Nic Sheff nearly succumbed to meth addiction. He’s now being played by Timothée Chalamet, the Oscar-nominated star of “Call Me by Your Name.”
Nic Sheff thought he was going to die. Sometimes he welcomed it.
“I came close many times,” he says of his early 20s, when he was addicted to methamphetamine. Nic was so unhappy when he was clean, he thought he might as well use until it killed him. “That,” he remembers thinking, “will be better than living sober.”
Nic began drinking when he was 11, later experimenting with pot and cocaine in high school. Crystal meth, which he tried at 18, was different. The euphoric rush, as he wrote in his memoir made him feel whole for the first time in his life. When meth wasn’t available, he substituted heroin or morphine. His
