An addict (in any stage of recovery) is NOT representational of who uses drugs. According to dr Carl Hart and dr Gabor mate, 80-90 percent of people who tried crack , meth and heroin did not become addicts
They are wrong about this. I like Gabor Mate but there are some areas in which I think he is very misguided this being one of them. The 80-90% number comes from a study or studies which found that 80-90% of people who tried drugs like methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine/crack do not currently use them and Gabor Mate used that to claim that the vast majority of people who try these drugs do not become addicted.
It's a ridiculous conclusion to make considering people like me would get counted as people who tried these drugs without becoming addicted. Never mind the fact that I used heroin for years, spent my entire life savings on it, went to jail, went through horrendous withdrawals and had it nearly kill me via overdose on a couple of occasions, I guess I was never addicted since I don't use it anymore.
It needs to be considered how you define addicted before putting forward a percentage. For example, do you count someone who tries crack, binges on it for several months and then stops after realizing he just spent what was supposed to be the downpayment for the house he had to buy on it? I don't have exact numbers but if I had to estimate I would say that more than 50% of people who try crack and heroin go on to experience some level of dependence on these drugs. Of course this number is inflated by the fact that people with a propensity toward substance abuse issues are probably a lot more likely to try crack and heroin than your average person. You'd have to do some kind of experiment where a random selection of people were given access to heroin and cocaine to see what the real number is. I still think it would be more than 10 percent for anyone who became any sort of regular/repeat user. It might be closer to 10% if you counted people who tried it once and then never did it again but in my experience it's actually the majority of people who ever become regular users of opiate drugs end up becoming dependent on them. It's rare to find long term successful chippers.