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So, how do you go from being a drug addict to a neuroscientist? What kind of person is able to make that leap? Well, Marc Lewis for one. He grew up a regular kid in Toronto -- the son of Russian-Canadians. Life in the Lewis home was good. That is, until Marc's parents sent him to a prep school in New England. And that's when things started to go wrong: it was a naval school with uniforms. And guns. And according to Marc, anti-Semitism. He was bullied, became depressed and homesick. He ultimately found an escape ... with drugs. It started with cough syrup and alcohol. Then, after high school -this is the late '60s now - Marc went to California and got into LSD and heroin.
By the late '70s, he was back in Canada but he got kicked out of graduate school for breaking into medical labs and stealing morphine. Along the way, he contracted hepatitis, his first marriage ended, he even broke into people's homes to steal drugs from their medicine chests.
Eventually Marc got clean. He started psychotherapy and went back to university. First, he became a professor of child psychology, then, a neuroscientist - his field for the past 12 years. And that's allowed Marc to study his addiction from the inside out -to see how drugs really affect the brain. He lays it all out - the addiction and the findings in a book called Memoirs of an Addicted Brain.
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