“There’s an idea called ‘the clinician’s illusion,’ ” Satel told me. It refers to the idea that addiction researchers and doctors tend to study and see only the most challenging cases, the people who can’t stop despite losing everything. And this leads researchers and doctors to believe that all cases of addiction are as hopeless. But research on regular people struggling with substance abuse suggests a much brighter outlook. Satel pointed me to one study that surveyed roughly twenty thousand people. It found that 75 percent who reported struggling with drugs before age twenty-four no longer
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