The Myth of Normal 172

Chapter 15 Just Not to Be You: Debunking the Myths About Addiction I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories. —Edgar Allan Poe Bruce, a vascular surgeon in Oregon, was donning his surgical gown when the police barged in. “I was hauled out of the hospital in handcuffs,” he recalled of that sunny day seven years ago. “It was beyond humiliating. I was practicing in a small town, so everybody knew. I was on the front page of the local paper multiple times. It became quite a fall from grace.” This trusted local figure had been writing prescriptions in his patients’ names, only to retrieve them himself to feed his addiction. “I was using enough, writing enough prescriptions,” he recounts, “that the initial suspicion by the police department was that I was running some sort of drug ring.” In a few short months, the jig was up. What could bring a highly trained, accomplished physician like Bruce, married, father of adolescents, to such depths of self-deception, dishonesty, and professional malfeasance? Surely he understood he was jeopardizing his health, family, and livelihood. Why, for that matter, would anyone indulge— if that is the right word—in such self-destructive behaviors? That question has confronted me almost daily throughout my career but most insistently in my twelve years working in Vancouver’s Downtown