My Addiction Was a Family Disease

Parenting is hard and blame is easy to throw around. Still, if my adolescent addictions had been seen as part of something larger than just "Anna's issues," it might have helped.

My parents started off pretty relaxed about drugs—by which I mean that they were open with me that they had smoked pot and they didn’t subscribe to any alarmist tactics when it came to warning me about any drugs. Whether this was ultimately good or bad, I have no idea. But it seemed like the right way: We lived in Marin County and this was the ‘80s, which meant that members of the Grateful Dead frequented the same local supermarket as us. Being alarmist about drugs in the '80s was not the Marin way.

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