Why Would a Lawyer Choose to Give Bad Advice?

I give advice for a living. That’s been my profession for almost 20 years, and a hobby long before that. I do my best, but I don’t always get it right. This is a story about a time I gave bad advice.

In the late 1970s, the Good Lord charged Stan and Barbara* with reproducing beyond their modest means. Only one of their four kids turned out to have a substance abuse disorder, a pretty good rate for Southern Indiana. That one kid was my friend Ryan.*

I did not know Ryan to be saddled with addiction when we were teenagers. I just thought he was funny. He yelled at his boomer parents when they subjected him to their ridiculous rules, like “be home at a certain time” or “don’t break your sister’s bones” or “don’t build an altar to Satan in the family room.” None of our parents cared what we did, so why should they? It must be because they were crazy evangelicals, the kind that merited fierce resistance, the more outrageous the better.

Did such resistance include drinking to excess when the opportunity presented itself? Sure it did, and we, his friends, heartily encouraged it. We didn’t really know what substance abuse entailed outside of Nancy Reagan’s jabbering TV ads, which made it sound mysterious, forbidden, and cool. We knew that something bad could happen, but not ‘never-holding-down-a job, laying-waste-to-every-relationship-you-ever-cherished, shitting-yourself after-your-third-fight-in-a-halfway-house’ bad.