Fifty years after its publication, this literary fraud about a drug-addled girl is still on the shelves. Can its damaging lies about addiction ever be undone?
As a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s, my older sister Sarah struggled with drugs. It began with a prescription to Adderall. “All the positive reinforcement I got when I was on Adderall,” she says, “and then when I wasn’t, all the negative.” Soon she moved to stronger uppers like meth, which she always took in pill form because smoking it made her “feel like a drug addict.
The book scared me, is what I’m trying to say. But it also provided me with unexpected comfort. That Sarah could find something that spoke to her experiences, that she could commiserate with art in ways she wasn’t able to with anyone else at that time, temporarily relieved me of the guilt I felt over my inability to engage with that part of her problems—to even know the details, let alone do anything to help. And truthfully, I didn’t want to know.
When speaking to my sister about the book’s veracity, she points out something ironic about it: “I feel like the people who were going to do those kinds of drugs, a book wouldn’t have stopped them.” I think she’s right. Sure, there are probably a handful of kids who readand vowed to remain drug-free, but the people affected by Sparks’ work the most were not the ostensible audience, but their parents and politicians.
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