The End of My Addiction

vomit or surrounded by broken glass. She cleaned up me and the apartment on many occasions.
     
    Early in 2003, with a few days of abstinence under my belt, I took the Metro to visit my alcoholism specialist in the western suburbs of Paris. It was a normal appointment with no new discussion or decision about my treatment. As I was leaving the specialist’s office, which I’d visited regularly for many months, it occurred to me to say, “I know there is a park not too far from here. Could you give me walking directions?” Fifteen minutes later, I was in Parc de St.-Cloud, which commands a magnificent view overlooking Paris to the east.
    Parc de St.-Cloud is a French national park, the site of the Château de St.-Cloud, built in the late sixteenth century. Louis XVI bought the château for Marie Antoinette to use as her private retreat, and it was there that Napoléon took the title of Emperor of the French in 1804, followed in 1852 by his nephew Napoléon III. The château was destroyed in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but other historic buildings remain amid the park’s 185 acres of gardens and woods.
    Personal history drew me to the park, however. It was my favorite destination for Sunday outings with my family during my childhood, farther from home and with a greater sense of adventure for me than any other park we visited in or around Paris. The park was also at the beginning of the highway from Paris to Normandy, and as such my private landmark signifying the start of summer vacations and glorious days at the seaside.
    Walking in the park for the first time since I was a boy, I felt as if I were experiencing a premonition of the clarity and calm of an existence without anxiety, panic, or alcohol. “It’s like I am stepping into the Life of Afterward,” I thought to myself. An Alice in Wonderland sensation remained with me strongly for the rest of the day and lingered for a couple of days thereafter.
    It was not a feeling of going back to my pre-alcoholic state, which would simply mean returning to a state of chronic anxiety and vulnerability to addiction. Rather it was a feeling of bypassing my illness entirely as if it never happened, of crossing a threshold between my earliest childhood and my future.
     
    Around this time it occurred to me that I should expand my online searches to include animal trials with baclofen. One morning in the middle of February, I did keyword searches with different combinations of the words baclofen , panic , rats , alcohol , cocaine , heroin . Up popped a link to an abstract of a 1997 article in the journal Psychopharmacology entitled “Baclofen suppression of cocaine self-administration,” by D. C. Roberts and M. M. Andrews of the Institute of Neuroscience at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. The abstract said that in an experiment with rats that had been addicted to cocaine and could self-administer it by pressing a lever, a baclofen dose of 1.25 to 5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight “was shown to suppress cocaine intake for at least 4 [hours]” and that “previous results have indicated that baclofen appears to reduce specifically the [addicted rats’] motivation to respond for cocaine.” 2
    The use of suppression and suppress fascinated me. I wondered if baclofen might make it possible to suppress craving for an addictive substance altogether, rather than merely reduce it. The abstract’s subsequent reference to baclofen’s appearing only “to reduce…motivation to respond for cocaine” tempered my excitement, however. Although a reduced motivation to consume alcohol would certainly be positive and desirable, the word suppression seemed to promise more than that.
    I was also intrigued by the abstract’s mention of a dosage range of from 1.25 to 5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. This indicated that baclofen’s effects were strongly dose-dependent. I was encouraged by this because it suggested that a higher dose of baclofen than 180 milligrams a day might enable me to achieve the lasting abstinence from alcohol I dreamed of. At the same time, it suggested that a very high dose indeed, perhaps in excess of 400 milligrams a day, might be necessary, and this again raised a red flag in my mind about the safety of baclofen. Abstinence was not going to do me any good in the grave.
     
    I took my new love to Parc de St.-Cloud for a stroll through the grounds. Once more I felt I was entering la vie d’après , “the life of