Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction

By Judith Grisel

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From a renowned behavioral neuroscientist and recovering addict, a rare page-turning work of science that draws on personal insights to reveal how drugs work, the dangerous hold they can take on the brain, and the surprising way to combat today's epidemic of addiction.

Judith Grisel was a daily drug user and college dropout when she began to consider that her addiction might have a cure, one that she herself could perhaps discover by studying the brain. Now, after twenty-five years as a neuroscientist, she shares what she and other scientists have learned about addiction, enriched by captivating glimpses of her personal journey. 

In Never Enough, Grisel reveals the unfortunate bottom line of all regular drug use: there is no such thing as a free lunch. All drugs act on the brain in a way that diminishes their enjoyable effects and creates unpleasant ones with repeated use. Yet they have their appeal, and Grisel draws on anecdotes both comic and tragic from her own days of using as she limns the science behind the love of various drugs, from marijuana to alcohol, opiates to psychedelics, speed to spice. 

With more than one in five people over the age of fourteen addicted, drug abuse has been called the most formidable health problem worldwide, and Grisel delves with compassion into the science of this scourge. She points to what is different about the brains of addicts even before they first pick up a drink or drug, highlights the changes that take place in the brain and behavior as a result of chronic using, and shares the surprising hidden gifts of personality that addiction can expose. She describes what drove her to addiction, what helped her recover, and her belief that a “cure” for addiction will not be found in our individual brains but in the way we interact with our communities. Set apart by its color, candor, and bell-clear writing, Never Enough is a revelatory look at the roles drugs play in all of our lives and offers crucial new insight into how we can solve the epidemic of abuse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780385542852

Judith Grisel

Judith Grisel, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Bucknell University, and an internationally recognised behavioural neuroscientist with expertise in pharmacology and genetics whose research focuses on determining the root causes of drug addiction. Her recent research helps explain the different trajectories of alcohol abuse in men and women.

Reviews for Never Enough

[hjvanderklis_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After years of experience as drugs addict, Judith Grisel got sober and embraced the chance to scientifically study the mechanisms underneath addictive substances, and their consequences on behavior. Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction is her accessible and authoritative guide through a taxonomy of stimulants, depressants, uppers and downers, alcoholics, plants, liquids, pills, and needles.Addiction today is epidemic and catastrophic. The personal and social consequences of this widespread and relentless urge are almost too large to grasp. In the United States alone some 16 percent of the population aged twelve and above meet criteria for a substance use disorder. In purely financial terms, it costs more than five times as much as AIDS and twice as much as cancer. The book highlights the current knowledge neuroscience has brought on this topic. How are substances transmitted into cells, synapses and influence behavior, central nerve system, and impact movements, speech, memory, fetus' health, etcetera? When any drug has an effect, it's due to the drug's chemical actions on brain structures. For most drugs of abuse, we know precisely which structures are modified, and this gives us a really good start to understand how they make us feel the way they do. Yet, there's still much we don't know yet.The bottom line in is this book is that there can never be enough drug. Because of the brain's tremendous capacity to adapt, it's impossible for a regular user to get high, and the best a voracious appetite for more drug can hope to accomplish is to stave off withdrawal. This situation is best recognized as a dead end, in the most literal sense. But to wait for a biomedical or any outside cure is to miss asking questions of ourselves and considering our own role in the epidemic. While we are at it, instead of wringing our hands, we might try holding one another's.

[tytania-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Informative book about addiction by a neuroscientist - and former addict.Grisel wrote her thesis on the mechanism by which morphine is more addictive in familiar contexts than in novel contexts; a kind of Pavlovian effect triggers an anticipatory process in the brain. This process, dubbed "the b process", is the brain's effort to maintain stasis in response to "the a process", the effects of the drug itself. This is the key to Grisel's model of addiction, the graph of which she would get tattooed on her body if she ever wanted to get a tattoo. A drug floods the brain with a certain effect, and the brain in response tries to fight back, to counterbalance it. After more and more instances of taking the drug, the "b process" becomes stronger, lasting longer and kicking in sooner. So think of the drug's effect as "the good feeling"; this means you're going to get more and more "bad feeling", sooner, heavier, and lasting longer, until you've got a case of classic addiction: you're no longer taking the drug to feel good. You're taking it not to feel bad.The chapters each deal with a different category of drug, based on how it achieves its effects. I read the chapter on alcohol with interest, as I dabble sometimes with the idea of stopping drinking altogether. The more I think about it, the more I feel that regular imbibing is really not such a good idea. Counting alcoholism as one of her past addictions, Grisel is strong in her condemnation of it, and heavy are her lamentations of its ubiquity and heavy advertisement. But I feel she's remiss in not discussing its central place in so many cultures for so many centuries - people have practically bathed in the stuff, and continue to do so, all over Europe and beyond. Wine accompanies every meal as a matter of course. Is this stuff really so bad for you? Why has it persisted? And she doesn't discuss its value as a social lubricant. She deals with it merely as a depressive, a downer, and wonders why people want to get depressed and "dimmed" whenever it's time to celebrate something. But booze is only technically a downer. For me its value is in the way it greases the wheels of interaction with other people. She never mentions this.Poor Grisel. You really do feel for her... her addiction is still a real living thing. She misses pot so much, and she is so jealous of people who can drink one or two drinks and stop. They absolutely confound her. She sees her husband peruse a menu of microbrews, which lists the alcohol content of each, and can't understand why it isn't an easy choice of picking the most alcoholic one. A coworker mentions leaving an event after only two drinks because she has to work in the morning, and Grisel can't fathom what one thing has to do with the other. I mean, of course she understands these things on an intellectual level, but she can't make them jibe with her own experience. When she was a drinker, she DRANK.Meanwhile, I wonder how Dr. Carl L. Hart of DRUG USE FOR GROWNUPS is doing these days...