Judy Grisel

I'm a recovering drug addict who transformed my life experience into a career as a neuroscientist specializing in addiction. I started using drugs when I was almost 12, drank a bunch of alcohol, and thought it was phenomenal. I was off to the races, and my whole life, the things I cared about, my family, all of that kind of went to the wayside. I eventually got kicked out of preschool, contracted hepatitis from sharing dirty needles, and got to a place where I was really hating myself when I was only in my teens. Cocaine was my biggest catalyst. I didn't want to get on this trajectory, but I wanted to cure myself so that I could use, and that seemed reasonable in my clouded state. Despite evidence to the contrary, I ended up sticking with school because I had this sense that there's something different about the brains and biology of people like me compared to people who can sort of take it or leave it. That's how I became a neuroscientist. It took me 7 years to get my undergrad, and 7 years for my PhD, then I did a postdoc, and then I took my first job thinking I was going to cure addiction at the level of the brain. I was working in mice on the role of stress, sex hormones, environmental influences like learning, and developmental experiences. Then I became an expert in the genetics of addiction, doing a postdoc right around the time the Human Genome Project was being completed. Neither did that turn out to be as helpful as everybody anticipated at the time. Meanwhile, I was sort of discouraged, but it's a very interesting problem, and I was sober. I'll have 40 years clean and sober in July if all goes well, right now 39. I wrote the book because it was frustrating to see that more people were dying than ever before, and despite my and other people's efforts, we weren't really making headway. I thought that if people could understand how it is that there's never enough, what a kind of dead-end regular use is, and it's just due to the way the brain works, it's sort of a fundamental principle, kind of like the first law of thermodynamics. You can't create or destroy energy, so kind of taking good feelings out of the bank, you have to pay those back, and you get in this vicious cycle of trying to feel better and making things worse. When I wrote the book, it was mostly because I wanted a sabbatical in Italy, and I was frustrated, and I didn't want to spend it in the BioLab. I was surprised when it went well. I think it really resonates because about a third of the population in the world suffer with some addictive disorder. It's so prevalent, most of us know people who have really suffered. We're in need of more understanding about not only the biology, but the social and cultural and all the factors, psychological factors.