Author: Marc

I’m nervous. I’m leaving for Toronto tomorrow for a publicity tour. The book is getting a lot of press, including a full-page article by Ian Brown in yesterday’s Globe. People seem to be grabbed by it. Some admire it. Some are shocked, even horrified, that this professor guy could ever have done such awful things. Some might feel both admiration and disdain. I don’t know for sure, but I’m about to find out. My publicist at Random House has set up a dozen radio interviews and three or four TV spots, including Canada AM and The Hour with George Strombo (gulp). And that’s great for the book… but I’m not sure I want to be there.

The book became more honest the longer I worked on it. I was going to reveal some of the past. Yeah, talk about the acid trips, the bust, well okay the busts, plural, then first experiences with heroin, maybe leave out the OD thing, get into the opium dens in Calcutta—that seemed suitably exotic. But those years of breaking into places, to get drugs, the intense compulsions, the suicidal risks, the lying and cheating and stealing and more stealing…I wasn’t planning to tell it all. But it just kept pouring out.

And then suddenly the book was finished. It was in the hands of the publisher, and I couldn’t have censored it or recanted it if I tried. Okay, I quit thirty years ago. And I’ve redeemed myself, haven’t I? Got back into grad school, worked really hard, got hired as a professor. I’m a neuroscientist now: all brain, no body, no pustules, no scars. Hah! You don’t live through a decade of addiction without a lot of scars, or without some crazy compensations to keep the wounds from opening up again.

So what I’m nervous about is that my squeaky-clean persona is going to be in front of that camera or that microphone and it’s going to turn transparent, so that everyone—relatives, colleagues, friends, ex-wives, children, ex-children—everyone can see the dirt below the surface. What am I going to talk about? How bad it was? How sick it was? How much fun it was? That crazy roller-coaster ride? Not knowing how to get off? And how my brain made me do it… How’s that going to go over?

Wish me luck, because it’s all going to happen in a few days. Feels like another roller-coaster ride, this one legal and acceptable, but with some of the same icicles dripping down the back of my throat.

In less than a week my book will be released. It’s called Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, and it recounts the story of my years of almost continuous drug taking and periods of intense addiction—interspersed with neuroscience, to help explain what was happening to me, why it was happening, and how it is that addictions are, in part, products of our biology. The book says a lot of what I have to say. It’s written from the perspective of a neuroscientist and a recovered addict. So it speaks to both the raw, often horrendous experience of drug use and addiction and to the science of how brains operate, when they’re under the influence…or desperately wishing they were.

So, if the book says it all, why a blog?

This blog can be a meeting ground for people with starkly different backgrounds and life experiences—people who have one thing in common: their lives have been deeply affected by addiction. These include present and former addicts, whether to drugs, alcohol, food, gambling, or other obsessions. They include people whose family members or loved ones have been beaten down by addiction. They include people who just love drugs, or are fascinated by them, who may remain free of addiction for now or forever. And they include scientists, clinicians, mental health professionals, and others who’ve devoted their minds and their careers to trying to understand addiction or help alleviate it. Scientists, clinicians, addicts, nonaddicted druggies…all of us have a lot to say to each other, and a lot to learn from each other. Our lives, one way or another, have been caught in the magnetic field of substances or activities that hijack the nervous system, because…well let’s face it, because they are tremendously attractive.

I know you’re out there: fellow travelers looking at addiction from the inside, because that’s you, or from the outside, because that’s what you’ve devoted your life to studying. I know you’ve got a lot to share. I hope this site will provide space for conversation, confession, soul-searching, questions nobody can answer and questions that we might be able to answer for each other. And I know that scientists, clinicians, and addicts have to talk to each other.

Now I want to hear from you. Tell me how this blog can work for you. What do you want to get out of it? What do you want to tell us and what do you want to learn? How can I help by sharing my own struggles, my own knowledge, and by guiding the conversation to the benefit of all?