Maia SzalavitzFor years I've fought with bosses who really liked my worked but wished I were just more normal. (Whatever the hell that means.) And I patiently tried to explain that they are simply not going to get a brilliant person willing to work 16 hours a day in a "regular guy" package. I fear most people will never understand this. But let me explain a little.

What makes me good at solving problems and working effectively is my creativity. This is also what allows me to work long hours: I enjoy the process. But my creativity is flirtatious. It plays with any idea that comes around. The problem is that any society necessarily has a lot of mores that may work but make little sense. Take the belief of something above 90% of Americans who think this nation is "the best country in the world!" Obviously, this is an ill stated proposition. And most people who think it have little or no experience with any other country. And on almost any scale it is empirically false. But it works for people and makes the poor feel better about the fact that there is more income inequality and less income mobility than in many other advanced nations.

I have done some of my best work under the influence of drugs. In some of these cases, I could not have done the work without the drugs. There is no doubt that my drug use has hurt me in many ways. But there is equally no doubt that my drug use has helped me. In the end, I would say it's a wash. I would also say it was bound to be.

By saying this, I am not suggesting any kind of disease model of addiction. Rather, given my brain chemistry and the environmental factors that made me what I was, opioids were calling to me. The first time I took 8 mg of codeine, I knew I had discovered exactly what I had been looking for my whole life. For the first time I believed there could be a place like heaven where one is always happy. This is not the way most people would describe their first experience with opioids.

Maia Szalavitz over at The Fix has written an exceptional article, Should There Be Such a Thing as Addict Pride? The article was forwarded to me by scary smart alter reader Mike. As longtime readers know, this is something I talk about a lot. But it is always with a sense of despair: how can we ever get a bunch of drug users to chant, "We're here, we're high, get used to it"? But Szalavitz has a different take on it.

She talks about brain chemistry and compares drug addiction to the neurodiversity movement in the autism community. There is much to be said here. Drug users certainly have attributes that will make them less qualified for some occupations. For example, driving while high is a very bad idea: time slows down but the cars do not! Just the same, there are jobs that drug users will be better at, like newspaper publishing (they couldn't but be, considering what a farcical job the straights have done). The issue is: our brain chemistry is different and that doesn't make us worse, it only makes us different. Get used to it!

I don't agree with everything in the article, but most of it is dead on—and inspiring. Go read it. Now.

Are you still here?