The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Maté

Rob Lustig calls the United States “the drug capital of the world,” and he isn’t talking about cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine, nor even mass-marketed opioids like OxyContin. He is referring to sugar, a substance that, in 2013, the chief health officer of the Netherlands declared to be “addictive and the most dangerous drug of all times.” “Addictive” is not too strong a term. A Harvard Medical School study found that people ingesting foods with a high glycemic index—meaning, in practice, junk foods that rapidly elevate blood sugar levels—got hungrier faster. On fMRI scans, they showed activation of the same brain regions stimulated by drugs such as cocaine or heroin.[2] Never missing a profitable beat, multinational corporations vigorously market sugar-laden concoctions to children, and prey on people who, owing to trauma, penury, and grinding oppression, are especially vulnerable to addictive substances. The latter include poor Black people in the United States and the denizens of Brazil’s makeshift villages, the favelas. In many “developing” countries—a term that manages to be both condescending and euphemistic—troops of impoverished women are recruited to go door-to-door, selling such junk products to already