Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction

by Judith Grisel

I share these stories not to make readers uncomfortable (and I’m sorry if they do) or solely to qualify myself as a bona fide addict. My primary purpose in exposing my story is to illustrate the depths, as well as the breadth (in later chapters), of the addictive experience. I don’t think I was basically a good person who got mixed up with a bad crowd, for instance, or that I was somehow dealt a crummy hand in terms of genes or neurochemistry, parents, or personal history (though these all certainly had an influence). I also don’t think that I am essentially worse than or even different from others: not those spending down their allotment of days under bridges, or in prisons, or for that matter managing PTAs or running for public office. All of us face countless choices, and there is no bright line separating good and bad, order and entropy, life and death. Perhaps as a result of following rules or conventions, some live under the delusion that they are innocent, safe, or deserving of their status as well-fed citizens. But if there is a devil, it lives inside each of us. One of my greatest assets is knowing that my primary enemy is not outside me, and for this I am grateful to all my experiences. We all have the capacity for wrong; otherwise we could not, in fact, be free. The opposite of addiction, I have learned, is not sobriety but choice. For many like me, drugs act as potent tools that obscure freedom. But there are countless ways any of us might jump the rail, unwrap...