Statistics

Current population of the US - 320 million.
Current number of addicts in the US - 25  million.

Approximately 8% of the population of the United States are drug addicts. Wow, doesn't that sound ugly? What if I rephrased it...

Approximately 8% of the United States population are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. Hmmm... that's better, but still somewhat abrasive to the senses, and therefore undesirable as actual knowledge.

What about this... 23.8 million United States citizens, or roughly 8% of the population, currently struggle with substance abuse.

There! Now it's clinical, yet personal... intimate, yet quarantined... rife with intelligent statistical data, yet accessible to the simple sympathies of the overwhelmingly common asshole which comprises a something or another amount of the rest of the population of butt-heads do-gooders nay-sayers shit-snackers fart-knubblers butt-munchers yuck-nuckers and blue meanies.

Or, to put it a little more truthfully... a big-ass portion of the world population of human beings are turning to drugs as a means to simply 'stick it' in modern society - that is, to make their lives merely tolerable, as an alternative to blowing their brains out all over the rug and leaving just the worst mess for somebody to have to clean up, because that's just rude.

Did I mention that I happen to be one of the lucky 8%?

Wait...

Did I just say lucky? Hahaha! Apparently my subconscious has a morbid sense of humor, just like my awakenous! Hahaha. Huh. I meant unlucky. Har har hardee HAR HAR, motherfucker. The joke is on me... and you, too!

Seriously though, you do see how the joke is on both of us, right? How I typo'd the lucky without the 'un', which is a joke on me because I made the typo and because it's tragically ironic or something, but how it's also the joke on you, because you didn't know at first that I didn't mean to type 'lucky' instead of 'unlucky', so that you might have thought I was being jokingly tragically ironic? You understand that, right? What I just explained, about how the joke can be on both of us? You get it, right? Good. Onward, ho.

It's like rolling up a D&D character when you're born. You get all of these strengths and weaknesses, which manifest as various physical and mental attributes. You're good at this, you suck at that. You're more prone to this, you're less prone to that. It's just overwhelmingly likely that you'll be absolutely miserable and afraid all of the time ever, it's underwhelmingly unlikely that you'll be well adjusted and happy and just generally ok with yourself and your life.

So on the average - ignoring for the moment specific contributing factors such as demographics and genetics - the average US citizen has an 8% chance of becoming an addict at some point in their lives.  That is, you're more likely to come down with a 'pretty bad case of cancer', in the... in the general stomachly area of the abdomen, or something... to which you can refer to people by kind of vaguely patting your tummy, indicating the presence of... something malignant, I guess in the general area of the tummy... than to actually become an addict.

I honestly can't decide which one I think would be worse. I dunno. Can I trade in my addiction for cancer, to give it a test spin? Just to see if I like it better? Who do I talk to about that? Obama?