“Your book humanizes the addict,” many readers have told me. That acknowledgement reflects a fundamental and common misperception. Addicts are human. What keeps many of us from seeing that? It is only the habit of our egocentric mind that divides the world into “us and them.” More precisely, it is our inability—or refusal—to see the us in “them” and the them in what we take to be “us.” Such failure of imagination is seen in every realm, from personal relationships to international politics. Simply put, it reflects that clinging to identity which is our way of belonging to a group. And if we
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