The Myth of Normal 185

how it actually was. I don’t know the details, but Sheff did say that he and his son are now having candid and mutually compassionate conversations about those days, with the shared understanding that the pain of Nick’s childhood was a major driver of his later difficulties. As I have, Dr. Dan Sumrok has met the occasional trauma skeptic. With a long, graying beard hanging mid-chest and a passionate oratory style, this friend and colleague of mine in addiction medicine seems the very vision of a biblical prophet. But if Dan is an evangelist for anything, it’s sanity. Over his career as a family physician, first at the University of Tennessee medical school in Memphis, then in Nashville, and more recently in a rural area, he has treated nearly twenty-five thousand people with opiate addiction. He, too, sees past the medical view of addiction as disease, genetic or otherwise; in his experience, too, trauma is the foundational factor. “I began writing about this in 1980 when I was just discharged from the military. I was a first-year medical student, and my life was flying apart. I would say my best friends were George, Jack, and Jim—the whiskey brothers.”[*] “Some people,” Dan relates, “the real militant Twelve-Steppers, will say to me, and some of the treatment programs have said, ‘You know, it’s not all about trauma, Dr. Sumrok.’ I do want to reassure them, so I say, ‘I promise you, I’m keeping an open mind. I’m waiting to see the first person for whom it’s not all about trauma.’” One would have to wait a long time. Whatever the degree of injury, all addiction is a kind of refugee story: from intolerable feelings incurred through adversity and never processed, and into a state of temporary freedom, even if illusory. Again, try saying no to that. — It may surprise many to learn that no drug is in itself addictive, not even the most notorious “high risk” ones like crack or methamphetamine. Most people who try drugs, any drug, even repeatedly, never become addicted. The reasons why throw further light on the nature of addiction. I often ask audiences, “Is alcohol addictive: yes or no? Is food addictive: yes or no? Or work: yes or no? Or sex: yes or no? Or pornography, or