Wall Street Journal Book Review
What lessons can be gleaned from Mr. Lewis’s life and brain? Foremost, his story illustrates the paradox of addiction: that even though the brain is changed by drugs, the brain-owner is not helpless. He can, if motivated, devise strategies to deafen himself to the siren call of altered states.
Mr. Lewis also reminds us that people keep using not just because of the physiological dynamics of addiction but because drugs serve a purpose. They quell anxiety, dissolve boredom, suppress self-loathing. As he puts it: “In one way or another, whether they are junkies or executives, people take drugs because they are not feeling right.” The conventional wisdom among many experts, that addiction is a “chronic and relapsing brain disease,” cannot readily accommodate such reality.
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Informed by unparalleled neuroscientific insight and written with his usual flare, Marc Lewis’s The Biology of Desire effectively refutes the medical view of addiction as a brain disease. A bracing and informative corrective to the muddle that now characterizes public and professional discourse on this topic.” —Gabor Maté, M.D., author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
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