It looked at ten different terrible things that can happen to a kid, from physical abuse to sexual abuse to the death of a parent, to track how it shapes that child over their lifetime. These scientists discovered that for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult. Nearly two-thirds of injection drug use, they found, is the product of childhood trauma. This is a correlation so strong the scientists said it is “of an order of magnitude rarely seen in epidemiology or public health.” It means that child abuse is as
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