The End of My Addiction

does research on medications for anxiety, visited Paris from his home in New Jersey. Normally a reserved person, he told me, “Your paper is explosive!”
    I said, “For an explosion, it’s pretty silent.”
    “The fuse is lit. You’ve just got to get it in front of the right people. Baclofen affects GABA, so you should send it to George Koob. He’s Mr. GABA. I bet he’ll be fascinated.”
    A behavioral physiologist, George Koob chairs the Committee on the Neurobiology of Addictive Disorders at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Koob and his colleague Michel Le Moal are among the world’s leading experts on the brain’s reward mechanisms, which are crucial in addiction. Finding an e-mail address for Koob on one of his papers, I sent him a copy of my self-case report and asked for any feedback he might be able to give me. Time passed and I heard nothing from him.
    The printed issue of Alcohol and Alcoholism containing my selfcase report appeared in March. Professor Colin Martin, a clinical psychologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, wrote me an appreciative e-mail, congratulating me on the importance of my findings and my courage in revealing my identity. Apart from Giovanni Addolorato, he was the only person in the medical and research community to initiate contact with me on baclofen for nearly a year after the paper was published (and he remains one of only a handful of physicians and researchers to do so to date). I was puzzled that the first report in the medical literature of complete suppression of alcoholism, a deadly disease defined by the medical establishment as chronic and irreversible, had generated so little interest.
     
    A bolt from the blue surprised me when the April 11, 2005, issue of Business Week ran an article, “Can Alcoholism Be Treated?” The article featured my self-experiment. Although the reporter, Catherine Arnst, had interviewed a number of addiction experts, she had never contacted me and instead had simply drawn information and quotations from my self-case report. That said, aside from a few minor errors (which she corrected in the online edition) she presented the main facts of the matter accurately and dramatically.
    I briefly hoped that the Business Week article would lead to more contacts from the medical and research community or more media attention for baclofen. That hope soon faded.
    Georges Moroz, Colin Martin, and Catherine Arnst—and before them, Boris Pasche and my brother, Jean-Claude—all coming from different backgrounds and none of them an expert in addiction, had immediately grasped that my treatment approach had nothing to do with conventional addiction therapies. That led me to wonder if people in addiction medicine and research might not be able to see beyond the dogma of their field—something that is common in every medical specialty, not to mention being a familiar fact of human nature—or if the experts like Dr. S. and her department chief saw gaping holes in my argument. But Richard Glass, the JAMA editor who had recommended that I submit the self-case report to Alcohol and Alcoholism , Jonathan Chick, and the report’s two peer reviewers were experts on addiction, and they hadn’t noticed any such holes.
    Desperate for feedback that would give me a surer sense of my paper’s value, I sent it to Jean Dausset, one of France’s few living Nobel laureates in medicine. Although I knew he would want to look favorably on the paper because of our friendship, I also felt that he was too rigorous a scientist to let that bias his judgment. He would tell me plainly if he thought my experience with baclofen was a lucky anomaly. A few days later, his wife, Rosita, called. “Jean wants to see you,” she said. I visited their lovely apartment in Saint-Germain for the first time in many months. They both greeted me warmly and said that it was wonderful to see me looking so well.
    Jean gave me a hug. “You have discovered the treatment for addiction,” he said.
    “Well, perhaps only for my own alcoholism,” I said.
    “For addiction!” he declared.
    We then discussed the report’s implications. “Medical dogma can be slow to change,” Jean warned.
    Encouraged nonetheless by Jean’s estimate of the self-case report’s medical and scientific value, I decided to seize the initiative and send it to a number of researchers, asking for their feedback. PubMed was a source not only of abstracts, but also of researchers’