The link between trauma, drug use, and our search to feel better
As long as humans have experienced emotional crisis (which is to say: for all of human history), they’ve attempted to ease their pain with drugs—plant-based psychoactives like marijuana in preindustrial societies, alcohol during the Industrial Revolution (quickly industrializing late nineteenth-century London, population 1 million, consumed an estimated 200 million quarts of beer, 50 million quarts of wine, and 10 million quarts of rum each year, for example). What’s new about our modern era isn