Just an anecdote, so feel free to ignore. I have a family member who is a drug addict. It seems obvious to me that the same part of their brain which is responsible for their addiction is also responsible for them being a pretty amazing athlete. They would practice sports obsessively, chasing those tiny little hits each time they made a basket or caught a ball, in a way that was categorically unlike every other kid I ever knew. I'm not saying the addiction mechanism works like that for everybody else, but it's pretty clear to me that this person would do extremely well in an environment without modern drugs.
