The End of My Addiction

baclofen to be planned and organized was dismantled before it started. Despite all my work on the study proposal, I now hoped that PHRC would reject it so that it did not spoil the chance for any future trials of high-dose baclofen.
     
    Giancarlo Colombo had invited me to have dinner with him on April 12, the day before the start of the ESBRA conference. When I e-mailed to ask how I would recognize him, he told me he was two meters tall, or about six-foot-seven. I was still expecting an operatic, round, pasta-bellied fellow, but he turned out to be a slim, quiet, congenial man with whom I had a real meeting of the minds. In any case, I needn’t have worried about missing him.
    Over coffee on the terrace of La Rotonde and then at my suggestion over dinner at La Closerie des Lilas, Giancarlo asked all about my struggle with alcoholism and my history with baclofen, while I probed him about his research. At one point, I took out my doctor’s identification card, without which I could never have taken baclofen, and said, “This has been my passport to life.”
    In return it was fascinating to hear Giancarlo describe the experiments in his lab that showed, following David Roberts’s demonstration of baclofen’s dose-dependent effects on rats addicted to cocaine, that enough baclofen made rats addicted to alcohol stop pressing the lever to receive it and spontaneously turn to drinking water instead. With expressive hand gestures, Giancarlo mimed how the rats first eagerly pressed the lever for alcohol and then completely stopped doing so. The rats’ leg strength remained normal, but they had lost their motivation to consume alcohol.
    He also told me that my self-case report was now required reading for every new graduate and postdoctoral student joining his laboratory. He had grown exasperated with their saying of his baclofen experiments, “That’s just for rats. We’re interested in something that works in people.” My paper was Giancarlo’s preemptive response to such comments. That was gratifying to hear, and I described how stunned I’d been to have my paper not only enthusiastically recommended for publication in Alcohol and Alcoholism by both expert reviewers, but to see it described by one of the reviewers as a “precious cameo that deserved to be disseminated in the scientific community.”
    Giancarlo smiled. “I was that reviewer,” he said.
     
    The ESBRA conference was a wonderful opportunity to discuss both addiction in general and baclofen in particular with some of the world’s leading researchers in the field. Giancarlo generously introduced me to a number of people, including George Koob, with whom I’d been in e-mail contact, but had not yet met. Over a private lunch at his invitation, Professor Koob remarked that my conceptual approach—postulating craving suppression rather than craving reduction—was a good fit with the experiments he and his colleagues were doing. “With our experiments and your ideas,” he said jovially, “we may make some real progress.”
    The ESBRA conference also gave me the chance to meet, face to face, Jonathan Chick, the man responsible for publishing my self-case report. We had a warm talk. “In medicine,” he said to me, “it can take up to a generation for a new approach to be accepted.”
    Emboldened by my conversations with Giancarlo Colombo and George Koob, I said, “I think things are already changing, and I’m determined to do everything I can to accelerate the process.”
     
    The first developments for baclofen therapy in addiction medicine after the conference were very positive. A few months earlier, in January, I had received an e-mail from Dr. Pascal Gache, head of the alcohology unit of the University Hospitals of Geneva in Switzerland. He had first learned about me when an alcoholic woman patient showed him an article about my experiences with baclofen that, thanks to a journalist friend of a friend, had recently run in a French magazine called Top Santé (Best Health). The magazine was not his usual reading matter, but he was intrigued by the mention of my self-case report in Alcohol and Alcoholism , and after reading it, he invited me to give a talk in Geneva in June, for which Geneva University would pay my train and hotel costs. This was a very welcome turn of events, and I immediately wrote back to accept his invitation.
    In subsequent conversations, Dr. Gache said that he had four patients who seemed good candidates for