What most people don’t realize about addiction is that it is in you before the drug even shows up. That’s because the drug itself is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problem. The drug is the culmination, the final step—not the first. The very first time I smoked cocaine in Robin’s apartment, I was already an addict, I just didn’t know it. I was a silent bomb waiting to go off, my brain looking for the right drug to take hold. And at eighteen, it found me.
