HILARY FREEMAN

MARC LEWIS is not your typical former drug addict. Now a highlyregarded neuroscientist, he grew up in Canada as the child of middle-class, Conservative synagogue-attending parents and excelled academically. Yet by his mid-20s, he was addicted to opiates, shooting up and stealing to feed his habit.

But, as he argues in his new book, The Biology of Desire, Why Addiction is Not a Disease, published in the UK this week, Marc does not believe that addicts have an illness.

Rather, addiction is an unintended consequence of the brain doing what it is designed to do — seeking pleasure and relief. Treating addiction as a disease, he says, is at best unhelpful and, at worst, counterproductive to healing.

The book uses the true stories of five addicts to show how he believes addiction develops, and what we can do to overcome it.

Lewis, 65, is now based at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Softly spoken and greybearded, he has a calm aura, which is probably the result of the meditation he regularly practises, and which he used to help himself overcome his addiction at 30.

It is hard to imagine him as a self-confessed “bad kid”, who wore his injection bruises “like a badge of courage”.

Lewis’s family were strongly, culturally Jewish. He went to Hebrew classes and even to a Jewish day school but, after his barmitzvah, he recalls, he’d “had enough” of religion. At 15, he was enrolled in a US boarding school, and it was there that the “intersection point” between his Judaism and his history of addiction occurred. “It was a horrible experience,” he says.

“There was a lot of bullying and antisemitism. I was knocked over by it and really became quite depressed, and that was how I would frame the beginning of my years of addiction.”

He first experimented with alcohol and cough medicine, before trying marijuana. “I actually got arrested the third time I ever smoked dope. Naively, I didn’t know that it had an odour. I was sitting on the toilet in a restaurant in downtown New York, and suddenly the police were pounding on the door. I was dragged off to jail and my dad had to come and bail me out.”

That traumatic experience didn’t put him off. “It rarely does,” he claims. “Using punishment and consequence to try to stem addiction is universally unsuccessful. It actually sweetened the pot because now I could see myself as a bad kid.”

By the time he got to The University of California, Berkeley, it was 1968 and “drugs were flowing down the streets”. For Lewis, the lure was irresistible. “I was a mixedup kid, depressed, anxious, not sure how to socialise. Berkeley was a Mecca — I thought: ‘This is for me, now I know where I’m going.’”

Enchanted by LSD, it wasn’t long

I got arrested the third time I smoked dope