The End of My Addiction

current alcoholic individuals were admitted to the study. Baclofen was orally administered for 4 weeks, at a dose of 15 mg/day…for the first 3 days, with the dose increased to 30 mg/day for the remaining 27 days. Each subject was checked as an outpatient every week for the 4 weeks; at each visit…craving level was evaluated by the Alcohol Craving Scale (ACS), and abstinence from alcohol was assessed based on the individual’s self-evaluation, family member interview, and the main biological markers of alcohol abuse…
    RESULTS: Nine subjects completed the study; of these, two subjects continued to drink alcohol although they substantially reduced their daily drinks in the first week of treatment, whereas seven maintained abstinence throughout the experimental period. Craving was significantly reduced from the first week of the drug administration…and remained so throughout the entire treatment period. Participants also reported that obsessional thinking about alcohol disappeared…Tolerability was fair in all participants; headache, vertigo, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal pain, hypotension, increased sleepiness, and tiredness were present as side effects in the first stage of the treatment. No participants showed craving for the drug.
    CONCLUSIONS: With the limitations of the low number of individuals evaluated and the open design, this preliminary clinical study supports the preclinical evidence on the effect of baclofen in reducing alcohol intake. The anticraving properties of the drug suggest a possible role of baclofen in the treatment of individuals with alcohol problems.
    My head spun with all the intriguing information crammed into this abstract, from the “accumulating evidence” for baclofen reducing alcohol intake in animal studies to the new finding that baclofen “significantly reduced” alcohol intake and craving in alcoholic human beings. That side effects were modest, occurring only in the first three days of treatment, and that baclofen itself was apparently not addictive and induced no craving of its own, also fascinated me. And so, once more, did the dosage of 30 milligrams—half the amount Professor Childress had used in her study at the University of Pennsylvania.
    Determined to read the whole article, I visited the medical library at Hôpital Cochin for the first time since my days as a medical student. I was wearing a tweed jacket that had belonged to my father, and in the hope that it would keep people from somehow intuiting that I was an alcoholic and dismissing me on that basis, I once more had the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor pinned to my lapel. The system for looking up medical journals had changed thanks to computerization, but with a librarian’s assistance I found the article and photocopied it.
    After reading it, I was all the more eager to try baclofen—if I could be assured of its safety. For that I felt I could not rely on abstracts. I needed to talk to someone who actually prescribed baclofen to patients.
    The article gave the full name of the lead researcher, Giovanni Addolorato, and supplied his affiliation with the Institute of Internal Medicine at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome. On a number of occasions—sober, drunk, and hungover—I tried to reach Dr. Addolorato by telephone, but never succeeded.
    I took the article to my alcoholism specialist and my CBT practitioner. But they both dismissed the paper without looking at it. “It’s one small study of an unproven medication,” they said, and neither wanted to consider prescribing an unfamiliar drug.
    I was beside myself with frustration. My life was hanging in the balance, and neither had a sound medical reason for refusing to prescribe a drug that just might help me stop drinking. I thought, “If I’m going to take baclofen, I’ll have to self-prescribe.”
    My only concern was that I still had been unable to determine how safe the drug was. Then I remembered that Linda Carroll’s article described baclofen as “an older medication, used for years to treat muscle spasms.” It occurred to me that this meant baclofen was probably used to some extent in neurology, and that my colleague and friend John Schaefer, whom I trusted implicitly, was a top neurologist with long experience in the field. If anyone could tell me about baclofen’s safety, it would be John.
    But I didn’t want John to know the real reason I was interested in baclofen. Even if I didn’t mention my