Dirty : A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic

Rating:
Summary: DIRTY is an essential read!
Review: As a mother of an 18 year old son who has used for most of his teen years, I found this book captivating. It was at times difficult to read as it hit so close to heart and home. Being on this journey with my son has been the most difficult period of my life.
This book is so important because it points out the frightning statistics for our troubled youth and how it affects our whole society. In addition, it addresses the importance of re-thinking our priorities. We need to show our children that they are our most valuable priority. Meredith Maran provides good insight as to what we can do to overcome this battle.
Even if your child isn't using (or if you don't have children), this book points out just how our teens are affecting you and your child. It is crucial America deal with this epidemic! This book a must read.

Rating:
Summary: DIRTY is an essential read!
Review: As a mother of an 18 year old son who has used for most of his teen years, I found this book captivating. It was at times difficult to read as it hit so close to heart and home. Being on this journey with my son has been the most difficult period of my life.
This book is so important because it points out the frightning statistics for our troubled youth and how it affects our whole society. In addition, it addresses the importance of re-thinking our priorities. We need to show our children that they are our most valuable priority. Meredith Maran provides good insight as to what we can do to overcome this battle.
Even if your child isn't using (or if you don't have children), this book points out just how our teens are affecting you and your child. It is crucial America deal with this epidemic! This book a must read.

Rating:
Summary: "Dirty" A compelling story and a call to personal action
Review: As a social services professional, former educator, and parent, I've had my fill of simplistic "solutions" offered by career policicians and professional opportunists to the complex and systemic problems related to drug use and abuse by adolescents.

Ms. Maran weaves the stories of three struggling teenagers in with social science, research, insights, and her own personal experiences in a way that will convince readers that we're all responsible for part of the problem and all capable of participating in a search for solutions.

I hesitate to suggest anything is a "must read" or "must see," but if you care about our children or our American society, you need to read this book and experience the sense of urgency and purpose that may come to you at its end. If you read this book you'll reach the conclusions that: 1. We're failing our children as a nation; 2. There's nevertheless hope; and 3. You can do something to make a difference.

Along the way, you'll feel your own bewilderment, anger, frustration, hope, and disappointment - and you'll understand all those emotions from the point of view of the kids, families and caretakers caught up in drug abuse.

Rating:
Summary: A Book for Parents, Educators, and Adolescents
Review: Being the mother of a child who is addicted to drugs has been the most painful journey imaginable. In my search for answers, I have run the gamut from counselors to drug rehabs to other parents living this nightmare. I wish Dirty had been available to me five years ago.

Meredith Maran writes about the three kids in this book as a non judgmental observer who brings very human stories to life, as well as some ground breaking ideas about what we ALL can do to stem this epidemic. The stories of the main characters (who Maran chose from 3 different treatment modalities) are so compelling, and told with love, affection, and concern so often absent in the lives of kids like Mike, Zalika, and Tristan.

Often kids like those portrayed have disconnected from family.
Maran makes us recognize the humanity and value of these children
Even if you are not directly impacted by teenage drug addiction, you will find Dirty a great read.

Rating:
Summary: Don't be in denial
Review: I taught for over 30 years and sadly found too many parents, teachers, and others interacting with teens to be clueless about today's adolescents. Anyone who cares about teens, especially those who think "It could never happen to my kids" or what I've heard so often "I don't have kids like THAT in my class" I strongly recommend Meredith Maran's book DIRTY. It is a very powerful read that offers a realistic view of far too many of our young people.

Nancy Rubin

Rating:
Summary: Honest but flawed
Review: Read this book, but take the author's theories with a grain of salt. The accounts of the teens' experiences are well worth reading, and the author makes some trenchant observations as well. She usefully distinguishes between drug use and drug abuse, which far too few commentators do. However, she relies on too few and too biased sources for information about the "teen drug epidemic" and about the course of addiction.

Another concern I had about the book was that the subject she chose to follow through drug court appeared not to be an addict. Although this subject had serious problems (she ran away from home and worked as a prostitute, beginning at age 12) and both used and sold drugs, based on what is reported in the book she was not the kind of compulsive user who really qualifies as an addict. Although her story is interesting, it does not offer a fair evaluation of drug court programs. This subject was put in drug court as a last resort, not because it offered her the kinds of help she really needed.

More troubling, some of Maran's thoughts about teen addiction are not borne out by the evidence in her own book (let alone the other data available). At several points in the book, she questions whether teenagers can really be "addicts," and/or whether it is useful to teach kids with drug problems that addiction is something they will have to deal with for their entire lives. While she makes a good point that "forever" is a difficult concept for kids to grasp, that fact does not justify sugarcoating the truth. Kids need adults to tell them the unvarnished truth, even when the truth is painful. Just as responsible adults would tell children with diabetes that, although we may hope for a cure, realistically it is likely they will have to deal with diabetes as long as they live, we should tell young drug addicts the same thing. (Not all users are addicts, but that does not mean addiction never occurs.)

Maran's discomfort with the "addict" label and her subject in general seems to be messily bound up with her son's drug abuse, her own recreational use as a teenager, and the stigma associated with addiction. She appears guilty and defensive about her permissive parenting, even though the stories in the book teach us that authoritarian parents can also have kids who abuse drugs. She wants to believe that the teens she profiled may "age out" of their drug use, just as many young recreational drug users do, even when the kids' own stories suggest intervention is essential.

She wants to believe that since she used drugs as a teen (and may still as an adult, although that is unclear) and experienced no untoward consequences, everyone else should be able to do the same. Unfortunately, life is not fair. Though most people who experiment with drugs will experience no significant problems as a result, about 10% will abuse drugs or become addicted to an extent that drug use interferes with their ability to fulfill obligations, maintain relationships, achieve goals, stay out of the justice system, and the like. Wishing it were otherwise will not make it so.

Maran's thinking also appears clouded by the stigma of immorality associated with addiction. Parents, teens, addicts of all ages, and society at large would be well-served to reject this stigma at every opportunity. Even though addiction may seem to originate in "voluntary" behavior (the initial experimentation with drugs), virtually no one sets out to be an addict, and no one is served by the moral opprobrium associated with addiction. Perhaps if the moral connotations could be stripped away, Maran would be more comfortable with the "addict" label. If not, she could refer to the problem as "abuse," but it is unconscionable to let readers believe that, with time, the abuse/addiction may magically go away on its own.

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read for Anyone Interested in This Issue
Review: This is an excellent book on a difficult subject. Ms. Maran has performed all of us an importance service by truly listening and writing about the teenagers in this book & by sharing her own experiences. This work gets behind and beyond the statistics and media news reports. By the end of the book the reader will care deeply about the fate of these individuals and have come to a deeper understanding of their hopes, fears, and motivations. It is all too easy to remain distant & detached from this problem. Ms. Maran's writing is immediate, intense, and very personal. I would recommend this book to all parents, teachers, and mental health professionals.

Rating:
Summary: A Provocative Page-Turner
Review: This is yet another massively dishonest, self-justifying book that entirely ignores America’s real drug problem. The author’s most incredible distortion is her claim that her Baby Boom generation were merely harmless pot experimenters, as opposed to today’s “crack whore” teens. What utter delusion. I invite Maran to spend a few days in the hospital emergency room or morgue of any major city or town--her own Bay Area ones are typical--and see who is overdosing, committing crimes, and dying from cocaine, crack, heroin, speed, and other illicit drugs. She’ll see what hospital and coroner records show--75% of the nation’s hard-drug problem is Baby Boomers over age 35, mostly white, who crime reports clearly show are also California’s and the nation’s fastest growing felon and prison population. In San Francisco, a whopping 1,800 people died from illegal-drug overdoses in the last five years; 1,400 of them were over 35 and just 100 were under age 25, though the latter got all the media attention, of course. The remarkable thing is that the vast majority of teenagers are NOT picking up their parents’ bad habits. The teenage overdose and death toll from heroin, crack, and other drugs is astoundingly low today--California’s teenage drug death toll has dropped by 80% since 1970 while drug deaths among middle-agers have more than triplied. Today, teenagers are five times more likely to suffer a drug-addicted parent than the other way around, and Maran and her older generation would fully deserve it if young people snapped her cohort out of their denial by authoring scary books deploring America’s very real “middle-aged drug epidemic.”