Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines his Former Life on Drugs

268 Pages·2013·1.65 MB·English

by  Marc Lewis PhD

Table of Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Introduction

• PART ONE • - THE TABOR CHRONICLES
Chapter 1 - CHANGING STATE
Chapter 2 - GIVING UP CONTROL
Chapter 3 - INTO THE FIRE
Chapter 4 - DOPAMINE AND DESIRE: A ROMANTIC INTERLUDE

• PART TWO • - LIFE AND DEATH IN CALIFORNIA
Chapter 5 - PULLING OUT THE STOPS
Chapter 6 - PSYCHEDELICS, SEX, AND VIOLENCE
Chapter 7 - A PSYCHEDELIC FINALE: COPS AND ANGELS
Chapter 8 - HEROIN, THE HEAP, AND THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD
Chapter 9 - GETTING DOWN

• PART THREE • - GOING PLACES
Chapter 10 - TRAVEL BROADENS THE MIND
Chapter 11 - CONSCIOUSNESS LOST AND FOUND
Chapter 12 - THE OPIUM FIELDS
• PART FOUR • - IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH
Chapter 13 - NIGHT LIFE IN RAT PARK
Chapter 14 - CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Chapter 15 - HEALING

EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
ENDNOTES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright Page
For Isabel,
who never lost confidence in this book or its author
INTRODUCTION
WE ARE PRONE TO A CYCLE of craving what we don’t have, finding it,
using it up or losing it, then craving it all the more. This cycle is at the root of all
addictions—addictions to drugs, sex, love, cigarettes, soap operas, wealth, and
wisdom itself. But why should this be so? Why are we desperate for what we
don’t have, or can’t have, often at great cost to what we do have, thereby risking
our peace and contentment, our safety, and even our lives? Why are we so
moved by our addictions, either succumbing to them or spending our energy
fighting them? This book shows how the fundamental workings of the brain are
at the root of the problem, but from a unique vantage point. I use the events of
my own life as a springboard to the addicted brain. In fact I’m an expert on the
matter, from inside out and outside in, because I’m a drug addict turned
neuroscientist.
In some ways, drugs are just another addiction. More powerful than many,
more harmful than most, but just another pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Yet drugs are also unlike any other addiction, more revealing than any other
addiction, because they ignite the neural flush of wellbeing directly, without the
requirement of any particular experience or event. Drugs trick the brain into
dispensing the neurochemicals of reward, or they mimic those chemicals
themselves. Drugs provide a shortcut. They talk to the brain in its own language
—the language of dopamine and peptides, neuromodulators and receptors. So
drugs can teach us a lot about the brain, and what we know about the brain can
teach us a lot about addiction. Neuroscientific research on addiction has
progressed enormously in the last twenty years. But it doesn’t go all the way. It
lays out the pieces of the puzzle but doesn’t connect them, because it ignores the
actual experiences that turn real people, motivated by hope as much as
hedonism, resolve as much as indulgence, back into addicts, again and again.
This book brings the brain and human experience together, by telling the story
of my descent into drug addiction, interspersed with lessons on the brain and its
workings drawn from contemporary neuroscience. I follow the thread of
adventures that began in a New England boarding school, when I was fifteen
years old and despondent, a thousand kilometres from my home in Toronto.
From there I moved to Berkeley, California, in the heyday of the drug
movement, and upgraded my flirtations with cough medicine to an infatuation
with LSD and then heroin. Interspersed with university life in Berkeley, I spent
two years in Asia, where I joined medics sniffing nitrous oxide in the Malay
jungle, bought heroin direct from the factory in Laos, and became a regular in
the opium dens of Calcutta. I moved back to Toronto, married a woman I
couldn’t talk to, began stealing drugs from the psychology lab, then from
medical centres, got clean, got divorced, fell off the wagon again, and ended up
working in a mental hospital where the howls of the crazy people drove me back
to crime. I finally got arrested and convicted, and then came the tortuous road to
a lasting recovery. At the age of thirty, I traded in my pharmaceutical supplies
for the life of a graduate student, eventually becoming a professor of
developmental psychology, and then of neuroscience—my field for the last
twelve years. Now I study the brains of children who get into trouble, using the
electrical signals from their scalps to explore what’s going on underneath. But I
often recall that I used to be one of those kids—that, no matter how many
scientific conferences I attend, I will always be one of those kids.
Each chapter introduces a new drug experience, or a new stage of drug
addiction, as the central theme of an episode from my own life and, sometimes,
the lives of lovers, seekers, and sinners I met along the way. And each of these
experiences is shown to emerge from a particular brain system, neurochemical
flow, or synaptic process. Through the interplay of lived experience and neural
activity, the addicted brain is revealed, and addiction is shown to be a basic
vulnerability of the nervous system itself.
The episodes recounted here are all factual, to the best of my ability to
remember them, though some are blended to maintain the pace, and names and
locations are sometimes disguised. I could not invent a story as strange and
frightening as the life I lived as an addict. The dialogue is a best approximation
of actual conversations, with some snippets burned in my memory and others
deduced from more general recollections. Over twenty volumes of journal
entries helped me recall what life was like in my teens and twenties. Finally, the
neuroscience in these pages, though simplified and accessible to the nonexpert,
is up to date and accurate. Many “brain books” pass on findings from twenty
years ago, or blur the details to make them more digestible. Here the details are
precise and the data as current as last year’s journal articles. The brain is
incredibly complex, but it is not beyond understanding.