Neuroscientist peers into own drug-altered brain

Marc Lewis' rock 'n' roll lifestyle in 1969 included every drug he could find -- or steal.

Marc Lewis has led a singular life. On one level it was enviable, with travels through Malaysia, Thailand and India, and studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Yet it was also intensely disturbing. In his mid-teens, Lewis, a nice middle-class kid from Toronto, began to experiment with drugs and ended up as an addict. A serious addict. He juxtaposes much of his painful autobiography with fascinating neuroscientific explanations in his new book, Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs.
“It was a challenge to see if I could write a book that wove an account of what’s going on in your brain in parallel with what’s going on in your life,” Lewis explained in an interview. “The thing I knew best was my own story. And the most intense roller-coaster part of my life was the addiction.”
Lewis grew up in the affluent suburb of York Mills in the 1960s, then as a young teen was sent to New England to attend private school. His spiral into drug use started after his arrival there. Leaving York Mills Collegiate and his family in Canada to go to Tabor Academy, a preparatory school in Massachusetts, was such an emotional wrench that he slumped into depression. He sought release first through alcohol, then other drugs.
He eventually enrolled for a B.A. at Berkeley — a hotbed for radical politics and drugs such as LSD. He dropped out after two years and had the luck to move to Kuala Lumpur where his father worked as a doctor. It was very easy there to get drugs. “I was infatuated with drugs,” Lewis writes. “Their scent was everywhere, in my father’s medical connections and in the half-hearted legal restrictions of the society at large. I kept my eyes and ears open. . . There was a lot to explore for an intrepid druggie.”
Lewis experimented with marijuana, dextromethorphan (found in cough syrup), LSD, methamphetamine, Demerol, Percodan, morphine, heroin, opium and every kind of whacked-out pharmaceutical he could buy or steal. Except crack. It wasn’t invented yet.
Living in Malaysia led Lewis to explore neighbouring countries, places where it was easy to get opium. “In the early seventies there was a well-known path that passed through Indonesia, Singapore, Bangkok, Vientiane (in Laos), Chiang Mai (a city in northern Thailand), and Burma, then emptied like a sewer into India, where it branched off to Calcutta, Varanasi, and Goa, or north to Darjeeling and Kathmandu (in Nepal),” he writes. “This was where the young and displaced from the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, France and Australia went to find adventures — the intra-psychic variety supplied by drugs and the geographic and cultural variety found in every town and village.”
Lewis contracted hepatitis several times, stole drugs from his father in Malaysia and later from university labs where he did research. “I would shoot morphine in the university library, sitting on the toilet,” he writes. “Then I would walk through the stacks, intent on the subterfuge. Devoted student or despicable addict? Who would ever know? Who could even guess?” His first marriage ended badly and he began to break into medical centres and even into homes searching through strangers’ drug cabinets, looking for his next high.
All the time his brain was changing as it was being bombarded with the chemicals he subjected himself to. He illustrates this with diagrams and easy-to-comprehend scientific description. When one takes opium, he explains, it feels good in two ways. “First, by inhibiting the firing of neurons that are activated by pain or stress. These neurons are found all over the brain, in locations such as the spinal cord where pain is first processed; the brain stem; a region of the cortex called the insula, where pain and other feelings are felt and made conscious; the amygdala, where emotional reactions are orchestrated; and even the prefrontal cortex, where the world is evaluated and acted upon.
“The second way opioids make you feel good is by targeting receptors in a very specific brain region: the ventral striatum,” he writes. This is the home of motivation, wanting, desire. “At the brain level, opioids in the ventral striatum cause the feeling of wellbeing, but then they trigger dopamine release, enhancing the appeal of whatever’s showing up on the screen of perception. Natural goodies like food and sex certainly follow the progression from liking to wanting. Feels good — want more.”
It was when he was a psychology graduate student at the University of Windsor in the late ’70s that things blew apart. He was interning at Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital where he began stealing drugs, much as he had in the past and he became hooked on methamphetamine — speed. One night, as he searched through a hospital clinic looking for drugs to steal, he was nabbed by police. Again. But this time it was serious. He was not a kid anymore and he had to hire a lawyer and risk going to jail. Luckily, he was able to get letters of commendation from professors, psychologists and friends and was sentenced to months of probation But his story made the local newspaper and he was kicked out of the University of Windsor.
After that run-in with the law, Lewis finally quit his addictions, began psychotherapy and went back to university, becoming a professor of child psychology.
He recognizes he may have altered the workings of his brain forever. “The brain changes with addiction. Not in one or two systems, but in dozens. Neuroscientists are still trying to crack the problem, and each year they find more changes: changes in dopamine flow, changes in sensitivity to dopamine, changes in other neuromodulators such as acetylcholine, changes in the striatum, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, and profound changes in the prefrontal cortex, the seat of appraisal, judgment and consciousness itself.”
Mind-altering drugs fail, in the long run, to fulfill the need for relations with others, he learned: “Once addiction sets in, the brain will never return to the state — of innocence? — that preceded it.”
Lewis spent five years studying the neuroscience of how the brain is affected by drugs and writing his memoir. His life is good now, he says. He is remarried and is the father of twin girls, 5 years old. He teaches at Radboud University in the Netherlands where he moved last year after a professorship at the University of Toronto. He lives across the road from the Rhine River. He went through hell to get there, true, but somehow, unlike Orpheus who looked back into the underworld as he made his ascent, Lewis has been able — despite a recent operation on his spine which required painkillers — to resist the pull of addiction.
And write a very compelling book.