A Drug Fueled Life


Book Description

This book is a summary of one person's drugaEUR"influenced life and the eventual chaos and consequences that can occur through the progression of the disease. The book (or books, if you will) chronicles one person's many attempts and desire to escape the grip of addiction!




The Blizzard Party


Book Description

A panoramic novel set in New York City during the catastrophic blizzard of February 1978 On the night of February 6, 1978, an overwhelming nor'easter struck the city of New York. On that night, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a penthouse apartment of the stately Apelles, a crowd gathered for a grand party. And on that night Mr. Albert Haynes Caldwell—a partner emeritus at Swank, Brady & Plescher; Harvard class of '26; father of three; widower; atheist; and fiscal conservative—hatched a plan to fake a medical emergency and toss himself into the Hudson River, where he would drown. Jack Livings's The Blizzard Party is the story of that night.




Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts


Book Description

What if you learned that to lead well, you’d need to live like a drug addict? During treatment for drug addiction, Michael Brody-Waite learned three principles that became the difference between life and death: Practice rigorous authenticity Surrender the outcome Do uncomfortable work Leaving rehab, Michael entered the workplace where he was shocked to see most business leaders doing what he had been taught would kill him. He began to see striking similarities between drug addiction and what he calls “mask addiction.” Leaders everywhere were hiding their authentic selves in order to get what they wanted. They were doing things like: Saying yes when they could say no Hiding their weaknesses Avoiding difficult conversations Holding back their unique perspectives Instead of chasing drugs, leaders were chasing professional, financial, and social success from behind a mask—to the detriment of themselves and the people around them. Thanks to his recovery, Michael’s three principles gave him an unlikely competitive advantage throughout his career, resulting in a level of success unexpected for a “drug addict.” In Great Leaders Live Like Drug Addicts, Michael explains what drug addicts do to recover and provides a step-by-step program you can use to break free from your mask addiction to thrive in both work and life. He equips you with the tools you need to live and lead mask-free—tools to enable you to stop following others, lead yourself, and become one of the dynamic, growing, authentic leaders this world desperately needs.




Memoirs of an Addicted Brain


Book Description

A gripping, ultimately triumphant memoir that's also the most comprehensive and comprehensible study of the neuroscience of addiction written for the general public. FROM THE INTRODUCTION: "We are prone to a cycle of craving what we don't have, finding it, using it up or losing it, and then craving it all the more. This cycle is at the root of all addictions, addictions to drugs, sex, love, cigarettes, soap operas, wealth, and wisdom itself. But why should this be so? Why are we desperate for what we don't have, or can't have, often at great cost to what we do have, thereby risking our peace and contentment, our safety, and even our lives?" The answer, says Dr. Marc Lewis, lies in the structure and function of the human brain. Marc Lewis is a distinguished neuroscientist. And, for many years, he was a drug addict himself, dependent on a series of dangerous substances, from LSD to heroin. His narrative moves back and forth between the often dark, compellingly recounted story of his relationship with drugs and a revelatory analysis of what was going on in his brain. He shows how drugs speak to the brain - which is designed to seek rewards and soothe pain - in its own language. He shows in detail the neural mechanics of a variety of powerful drugs and of the onset of addiction, itself a distortion of normal perception. Dr. Lewis freed himself from addiction and ended up studying it. At the age of 30 he traded in his pharmaceutical supplies for the life of a graduate student, eventually becoming a professor of developmental psychology, and then of neuroscience - his field for the last 12 years. This is the story of his journey, seen from the inside out.




The Book of Drugs


Book Description

Recounts the addiction and recovery of the world-renowned solo artist and former lead singer and songwriter of Soul Coughing.




How to Murder Your Life


Book Description

From the New York Times bestselling author and former beauty editor Cat Marnell, a “vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic” (The New York Times) memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs. At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep. This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” (The New York Times Book Review) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no. Combining “all the intoxicating intrigue of a thriller and yet all the sobering pathos of a gifted writer’s true-life journey to recover her former health, happiness, ambitions, and identity” (Harper’s Bazaar), How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing, revelatory, and necessary.




Blitzed


Book Description

A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich” (Washington Post). The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers. In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories. Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—ultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroin—administered by his personal doctor. Thoroughly researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows. “Delightfully nuts.”—The New Yorker




Opium Fiend


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A renowned authority on the secret world of opium recounts his descent into ruinous obsession with one of the world’s oldest and most seductive drugs, in this harrowing memoir of addiction and recovery. A natural-born collector with a nose for exotic adventure, San Diego–born Steven Martin followed his bliss to Southeast Asia, where he found work as a freelance journalist. While researching an article about the vanishing culture of opium smoking, he was inspired to begin collecting rare nineteenth-century opium-smoking equipment. Over time, he amassed a valuable assortment of exquisite pipes, antique lamps, and other opium-related accessories—and began putting it all to use by smoking an extremely potent form of the drug called chandu. But what started out as recreational use grew into a thirty-pipe-a-day habit that consumed Martin’s every waking hour, left him incapable of work, and exacted a frightful physical and financial toll. In passages that will send a chill up the spine of anyone who has ever lived in the shadow of substance abuse, Martin chronicles his efforts to control and then conquer his addiction—from quitting cold turkey to taking “the cure” at a Buddhist monastery in the Thai countryside. At once a powerful personal story and a fascinating historical survey, Opium Fiend brims with anecdotes and lore surrounding the drug that some have called the methamphetamine of the nineteenth-century. It recalls the heyday of opium smoking in the United States and Europe and takes us inside the befogged opium dens of China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos. The drug’s beguiling effects are described in vivid detail—as are the excruciating pains of withdrawal—and there are intoxicating tales of pipes shared with an eclectic collection of opium aficionados, from Dutch dilettantes to hard-core addicts to world-weary foreign correspondents. A compelling tale of one man’s transformation from respected scholar to hapless drug slave, Opium Fiend puts us under opium’s spell alongside its protagonist, allowing contemporary readers to experience anew the insidious allure of a diabolical vice that the world has all but forgotten.




The Spiritual Path


Book Description

The author of international bestseller, Shantaram, takes us on a gripping personal journey of wonder and insight into science, belief, faith and devotion. Drawing on common-sense logic, sacred traditions, inspirations from the natural world and the iconoclastic instruction of his spiritual teacher, Roberts describes the step by step path he followed in search of spiritual connection, one that anyone, of any belief or none, can apply in their own lives. This gripping personal account of the Leap of Faith is a compellingly fresh, new addition to such enduring, spiritually inspiring works as Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Road Less Travelled and The Celestine Prophecy. From the Author: "The Spiritual Path is for anyone searching for meaning and connection, for more answers than questions, and for practical help in resetting the spiritual compass." Gregory David Roberts




Don't Count Me Out


Book Description

Don't Count Me Out chronicles the life of Bruce White from the beginning of his drug use in elementary school through criminal acts fueled by his need for drugs, to his miraculous recovery three decades later and involvement in the treatment of addicts, where he is now a leader in the rehabilitation field. Rafael Alvarez's recounting of White's journey should inspire those dealing with the fallout of addiction. Alvarez, a journalist and screenwriter, allows the reader to get inside the head of an addict who was stealing alcohol from his parents at the age of nine, selling drugs and tripping on LSD and PCP by the time he hit seventh grade, and hooked on morphine before he turned fifteen. "Bruce White? I thought he was dead?" is a response encountered in many of the interviews Alvarez conducted. Don't Count Me Out shines a spotlight on an improbable and stunning miracle. Though this is just one person's story, the contributing factors of early sexual assault, the role of permissive preoccupied parents, and the need for peer approval, among others, will resonate with many as the opioid crisis continues to haunt us.




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