The Myth of Normal 178

and your mother puts you on her lap, wraps you in a warm blanket, and gives you warm chicken soup—that’s what heroin feels like.” His fellow DTES resident, the poet Bud Osborn, also spoke of the soothing thaw heroin allowed him to experience. “I felt this warmth in the pit of my gut, which had always been really cold.” The rock guitarist[] and reality-TV star Dave Navarro told me that he found in his addictions “a kind of love and acceptance,” another running theme among users. His fellow podcaster and author, the British comedian Russell Brand, also spoke of love. “The first time I took heroin, it felt so sacred and spiritual and warm and maternal,” he said. “I felt like I was held . . . I felt like nothing mattered, and I felt safe.” His use of the word “maternal” is more than metaphorical: it speaks directly to the neurobiology of opiate addiction. Others find in their compulsive habits a kind of experience that people spend years pursuing in caves, monasteries, and high-priced retreat centers. “Alcohol,” the comedian and former Saturday Night Live mainstay Darrell Hammond said when we spoke, “gives you three or four hours of peace. Just peace. The talk in the head stops, the negative thinking. It’s precious.” Peace and quiet are not qualities most of us associate with the life of an addict, but these “precious” states are often what is sought—and, for a while, found. Lena Dunham’s tranquilizer dependence provided the temporary illusion of normalcy—an illusion reinforced by the fact that, in our society, her drugs of choice are often acquired via “legitimate” means—a doctor’s prescribing pad. “Pharmaceuticals hold this magical promise of making you function normally, or better than normally,” she says. “Alcohol, you smell it on someone; crack . . . you end up under a bridge. Klonopin,[] you can go for a pretty long time thinking, ‘Wow, I found the cure to not being able to function in the way that I think people should be able to function in the world.’” It’s worth asking: Who has ever heard of a “disease” that makes you “feel normal”? Or, when’s the last time getting sick made you “function better than normally”?