The End of My Addiction

So he did the only thing he could: he took his treatment into his own hands. Searching for a cure for his deadly disease, he happened upon baclofen, a muscle relaxant that had been used safely for years as a treatment for various types of muscle spasticity, but had more recently shown promising results in studies with laboratory animals addicted to a wide variety of substances. Dr. Ameisen prescribed himself the drug and experimented with increasingly higher dosages until he finally reached a level high enough to leave him free of any craving for alcohol. That was more than five years ago.

Alcoholism claims three hundred lives per day in the United States alone; one in four U.S. deaths is attributable to alcohol, tobacco, or illegal drugs. Baclofen, as prescribed under a doctor’s care, could possibly free many addicts from tragic and debilitating illness. But as long as the medical and research establishments continue to ignore a cure for one of the most deadly diseases in the world, we won’t be able to understand baclofen’s full addiction-treatment potential.

The End of My Addiction is both a memoir of Dr. Ameisen’s own struggle and a groundbreaking call to action—an urgent plea for research that can rescue millions from the scourge of addiction and spare their loved ones the collateral damage of the disease.

“A French-American cardiologist then affiliated with New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical College descended into years of hellish alcohol addiction that essentially ended his medical practice in 1997. His move back to Paris and self-treatment with the unproven drug baclofen is the subject of this clinical, thoroughgoing memoir. Early on, Ameisen, the child of Holocaust survivors and an accomplished pianist, recognized that deep-seated anxiety was driving him to drink, yet doctors treated the drinking rather than the anxiety. He tried years of AA, rehab and medication, but in time he was binging again-blacking out and ending up in psych wards or the emergency room with broken bones. When he read about the muscle relaxant baclofen in a New York Times article, suggesting that it could repress the craving in addicts as well as control muscular spasm, he seized on the drug as his life line. He researched baclofen, prescribed it to himself (thanks to France's medical identity cards) and essentially used himself as a study over several months, increasing the dosage as necessary. The results were remarkable, and his dogged self-case study published by the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism in 2005 gathered slow but intensive interest. As a trained physician who is evidently well connected, Ameisen is not a typical patient, yet his work is brave, insightful and sure to be significant.”

"You have discovered the treatment for addiction."—Jean Dausset, M.D., winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Medicine

"The End of My Addiction—part memoir, part medical mystery—has at its heart a bold claim: There is a happy-making pill that can cure alcoholism. More than 100,000 people die from alcoholism in the United States every year, making Olivier Ameisen's claims for the drug baclofen a world-changing discovery . . . He is as deft with the medical basis for baclofen's efficacy as he is unsparing in his personal account of alcohol's terrors . . . As struggling addicts come to recognize Ameisen's many failures, they may also find themselves advocating right beside him: Baclofen's out-of-patent status will surely require public rather than private funding and its convincingly argued promise is too large to neglect. In recounting his trials, Ameisen notes that 'there is scarcely another major illness whose treatment has been static over the last seventy or more years.' If the claims made by The End of My Addiction are true, Ameisen's story will not only be an engrossing journey from sickness to health, but one of medicine's heroic episodes."—Joel Turnipseed, The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)



"As a cardiologist, Olivier Ameisen was familiar with hospitals, but not being detained in a psychiatric ward. Being committed to a New York hospital after yet another drinking binge was one of the many low points in his seven-year s