A FORMER ADDICT EXPLORES THE NEURAL CHEMISTRY OF ADDICTION

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain By Marc Lewis

Doubleday 312 pages, $32.95

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 tack-led 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
travelling 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, get-ting
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 inter-act 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 pas-sages can be dense, the medi-calese nowhere
close to Neurochemistry for Dummies: "The choice leveraged by my dACC
[dorsal anterior cingulate cortex] this night is a noble alter-native
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 set-ting, however, so dedicated readers
will need to reshape the findings of Lewis into easily digestible bites.