A former addict looks at the neural chemistry of addiction

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Opponents of addiction memoirs complain that the attention-grabbing genre is tapped out. They argue that the formulaic structure — epic downward spiral, soul-searching at rock bottom, long and difficult road to recovery — is by now a dead end. And, what’s more, after so many authors have tackled identical topics (addiction to alcohol, OxyContin, heroin, methamphetamine, and so on), there’s nothing much left for an author to say, or for a reader to learn.
Cannily, in Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, Marc Lewis mixes the tried and true with a novel approach — a primer on the neural chemistry of addiction.
Across 15 chapters, Lewis, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto, begins with an episode from his years of active drug use and follows up with an informative lecture about the particular drug and the hows and whys of its unique effects.
Lewis — whose early appetite for narcotics astonishes (that someone can use so many harmful drugs for such a long time is, if nothing else, a testament to the body’s resilience) — ultimately reveals an engrossing picture of addiction as a queer sort of pleasure-seeking.
His chapter on love, in fact, links deep infatuation with cravings for a high; to a degree, they’re flip sides of the same coin.
The memoir begins in the author’s teens. Sent from Toronto to a hostile American military academy in the late 1960s, a lonely, bullied, and angry Lewis found solace in typical adolescent intoxicants: alcohol and marijuana. (And the less common too: cough syrup.)
Developing his taste for narcotics at the same time as the hippie counter-culture was moving mainstream, Lewis later (at Berkeley pursuing a degree) fed his addiction with nearly anything he could buy, borrow or steal. Staying with his father in Malaysia and traveling through Laos, Thailand, and India after dropping out, he shot, snorted, swallowed and drank his way through nature’s dangerous bounty, ending up on opium, morphine and heroin.
Overdoses, run-ins with family and police, and, finally, getting caught while breaking into a pharmacy (while a grad student in Ontario) led him to successful but intensive therapy.
The Icarus trajectory of Lewis in his 20s is naturally fascinating. Lewis is more scientist than poet, however, and his propensity for mixing metaphors and the visible striving for lyricism can be intrusive.
In each chapter, he wraps exposition about the interface of drug molecules and neural receptors. Explaining how each drug’s unique properties interact with a variety of brain parts and functions, he identifies the complexity of the relationship and how the particular drug creates its distinctive high.
The language in these passages can be dense, the medicalese nowhere close to Neurochemistry for Dummies: “The choice leveraged by my dACC [dorsal anterior cingulate cortex] this night is a noble alternative to the desire orchestrated by the partnership among my orbito-frontal cortex, ventral striatum, and amygdala, that ventral mafia of compulsion.” Lewis is evidently intrigued by the complicated interfacing of, say, dextromethorphan and a brain’s MNDA receptors. It’s questionable whether he dedicates enough effort to having non-specialist readers share that excitement.
For fans of the genre, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain will satisfy. The long fall and gradual recovery is an inherently appealing story, and Lewis tells it well. And for genre skeptics, Lewis supplies a surplus of educational material.
“The dopamine deluge is continuous rather than event-specific, and so are the secondary tides of norepinephrine and serotonin” is not wholly transferable to a dinner party setting, however, so dedicated readers will need to reshape the findings of Lewis into easily digestible bites.

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