who can sleep, and when — "Sober cocaine- and stimulant-addicts sleep pretty…"
Sober cocaine- and stimulant-addicts sleep pretty well by the second month, straight alcoholics by the fourth. Abstinent pot- and tranq-addicts can pretty much forget about sleep for the first year.
Context
The Ennet-nocturne frame delivered with a clinician's precision: recovery has a sleep schedule keyed to the drug you quit, and the book knows it cold — cocaine and stimulant addicts sleep by the second month, alcoholics by the fourth, pot and tranq addicts not for a year. The wee hours are the recovery house's true weather, a room full of the freshly abstinent who cannot sleep, and the datum makes the affliction physiological and specific: sobriety is not a state but a slow, substance-indexed recovery of the body's most ordinary function.