The Myth of Normal 177

matter—here, of course, we begin to shade toward addictions that go well beyond individual habits into the realm of collective fixations. Just as I have never met anyone who chose to become addicted, neither have I met anyone whose addictions did not, at their onset at least, provide for some essential human need. Over and over again, for example, I’ve heard that people’s addictions lubricate the gears of social connection. The Canadian Métis[*] writer, professor, and former inmate Jesse Thistle, author of the memoir From the Ashes, told me his substance use gave him “access to friends. And it gave me power, confidence. And it worked for a while—it worked for about the first three years. I became almost, like, bulletproof.” For her part, the multitalented television artist Lena Dunham recalled, “It made me more social. It made me more relaxed. It made it easier for me to communicate.” In her case, “it” was a dependence on, among other things, tranquilizers: highly addictive medications too freely dispensed by physicians. The boost extended to her creative self-expression: the drugs, she told me, “made me write like a demon because I just completely lost my inhibitions.” “Warmth” is an oft-heard descriptor for the feeling of being high—it captures a felt sense that addicts know well. The actor and children’s author Jamie Lee Curtis spoke to me of “this warm bath: the way it feels when you’re cold and you step into a warm, not hot, but a warm, really warm bath where that feeling of ease rises as you lower into the warmth. It was a very familiar feeling to me, and it was one that I loved. I chased that feeling for ten years in and out of everything from stealing opiates to manipulating doctors for opiates.” Curtis’s words reminded me of what I often heard from my hypermarginalized Downtown Eastside (DTES) patients. “What does the heroin do for you?” I once asked a patient just admitted to Onsite, the detox venue above Insite—then North America’s only supervised injection site, where I was staff physician. In his late thirties, with weightlifter arms, a shaved head, and a large brass ring piercing his right earlobe, this fiercelooking man looked right at me and said, “Doc, I don’t know how to tell you this, exactly. It’s like when you’re three years old, sick, shivering with fever,