The Myth of Normal 182

adolescents who had experienced either physical or sexual abuse were two to four times as likely to be using drugs as those who reported no such molestation.[8] The ones who suffered both physical and sexual abuse were at least twice as likely to be using drugs as others who had been subjected to either abuse by itself. Alcohol consumption has shown a similar pattern: in a national sample of ten thousand adolescents, those with histories of sexual abuse were three times more likely to begin drinking in adolescence.[9] — Now that we have cleared away the thicket of mistaken beliefs about addiction, gotten a sense of what it does for people under its sway, and begun to consider what sorts of life experiences would make those “perks” so palpable and attractive, I propose to pull back the curtain even further in the next chapter. It is yet another myth—at once convenient and highly damaging —that in our world there is a category we can label “addicts,” designating some identifiable group of poor, unfortunate souls, and then, neatly segregated from “those people,” there are the rest of us “normal” folks. To twist a line from the great George Carlin, it’s a big club—and we’re all in it