J
udith Grisel’s first drunken
experience was no different
to that of most middle‑class
teenagers – having had the
odd sip at family gatherings,
she and a friend, aged 13,
managed to get their hands on a
bottle of wine and downed the lot.
In many ways, she wishes she’d had
a bad time; instead, she recalls feeling
“physical relief and spiritual antidote”
to her adolescent angst and
ennui, leaving her hungry
for more. Soon, she was
outdrinking most of
her friends and veered
down a steep fork in
the road to full‑scale
addiction.
By 22, she was
homeless and
committing petty
crimes to feed a cocaine
habit, having been kicked
out of university and cut off by
her horrified parents to protect her
younger brothers.
Remarkably, the elegant,
thoughtful, mother‑of‑three, now 56,
didn’t just manage to get “squeaky
clean”, but a PhD in behavioural
neuroscience. As professor of
psychology at Bucknell University
in Pennsylvania, and an expert in
the neurobiology, chemistry and
genetics of addictive behaviour, she
has now published Never Enough- part drug manual, part seedy
memoir, which seeks to “explain
the science to people like me,” she
Former addict, now
top neuroscientist,
Judith Grisel tells
Rachel Cocker her
remarkable story
Does teen
drinking
really lead to
addiction?
says, “and explain people like me to
scientists.”
If her story seems unique, the
questions she has spent her career
trying to answer are universal: why do
some people get hooked on drink or
drugs when others don’t? And what
can be done to stop them?
These questions couldn’t feel more
pressing, given last week’s figures
showing that drug‑related fatalities
in England and Wales have hit record
levels (cocaine deaths, alone, have
doubled in the past three years). They
were swiftly followed by yesterday’s
NHS Digital report, suggesting well‑off
families are encouraging “dangerous”
drinking habits in their offspring
by allowing them to raid the drinks
cabinet, or offering them a glass of
wine with meals. Deaths caused by
alcohol misuse have been climbing
steadily since 2015.
The more Grisel has
discovered about what
addictive substances do
to adolescents, the more
she is “sure that even
a little bit of alcohol
can change brain
development.”
The brain strives for
homeostasis, she explains,
compensating for whatever
pleasurable state a drug
induces, with an equal and opposite
response: “Neurologically, there is
no free lunch.” And neurologically,
adulthood doesn’t hit until the age of
25, so hammering hard on your brain’s
pleasure pathway while it is still in
development affects its sensitivity.
“The problem is that kids who are
intoxicated with anything early on
probably have to step harder on the
gas pedal later, in order to get the same
benefit.” Simply put, the more alcohol
or drugs you consume as a teenager,
later the more you’ll need to consume
to get the same high.
Interestingly, there is a hereditary, aswell as environmental risk of addiction.
“Scientists have known for decades that
[it] runs in families,” says Grisel. So if
one of your biological parents was an
alcoholic, you are roughly 40 per cent
more likely to become one yourself –
regardless of whether you were raised
by them. If one of your grandparents
was, as in her own case, your risk is
about 20 per cent.
“The bitter truth about biology is
that we are not all created equally,” she
adds. “Some people are biologically
protected, and some people are
biologically at risk, and that is
unequivocal.”
Despite concerted efforts, no single
“addictive gene” has been identified.
Rather, addiction seems to exist on a
continuum, like intelligence or autism,
and can be catalysed by early years’
experiences and exposure. Still, if
addiction was once mistakenly cast asa purely moral failing, Grisel doesn’t
think the pendulum should swing so
far as to make personal agency moot.
This week, the MP Jess Phillips
revealed on Elizabeth Day’s How to
Fail podcast that, as a teenager, she felt
responsible for her brother’s heroinaddiction, saying: “I feel like he ended
up [an addict] because of me, because I
was bossy and I was always right and I
was the one who was clever and shiny.”
“No one can cause, or cure, or take
responsibility for someone else’s
addiction,” explains Grisel. “I madesome choices. And those choices were,
in retrospect, really dangerous.”
Was there anything that her parents
could have done differently?
“One thing that may have helped,”
she speculates, is “an environment that
was a little more risk‑embracing. My
parents were kind of tight and upper
middle class, and both anxious in their
own way. And I think it was just such
a suffocating thing for me; if I could
have been doing whitewater kayaking
or something, it might have been that
I could stretch myself in other ways...
I think for kids, maybe having ways
to push against the edges of their
experience is necessary.”
The best thing they did, she believes,
was kick her out of the house. “It got
very bad, pretty fast and I was worn
out by the time I was 23 – I felt like I
was 103. If they had let me live in the
basement and paid my bills, hookedup the internet, I think it would have
gone on for longer, for sure. So I think
consequences were necessary.”
So, ultimately, was love. On her
23rd birthday, her father made an
out‑of‑character emotional statement- that he just wanted her to be happy
- which finally collapsed her defences
and saw her enter rehab.
Now sober for 33 years, Grisel is
married to Jimmy, a technical design
engineer, with whom she has Maren,
a 16‑ year‑old daughter, and two
stepsons, aged 27 and 25.
It has been scary, given what
she knows about the heredity of
addiction, for her daughter to reach
the age that she first began to go off
the rails. “I remember in the midst of
my really bad time, my mother said to
me, ‘I hope you have a daughter just
like you’. And even then I realised that
was a pretty serious curse.”
Maren does seem to be different
by nature, she notes. When she was
about three, Grisel was at a friend’s
party, holding her at the edge of a
porch. “She turned to me, and said,
‘Mummy, is this safe?’ And it was
such a great relief, because I thought,
‘Well, I have never asked that
question in my life.”
Her husband drinks moderately,
and they have alcohol in the house,
but it’s not a feature at the dinner
table. And whenever temptation rears
its head, “I’m able to see that I have a
lot to lose. And what’s hard, is in the
beginning, you don’t.”
She is jealous of people who can
moderate – “I don’t know what it’s
like; they speak a language that I don’t
understand.”
The mother of a teenager, who
she thinks has a drinking problem,
recently asked her: “What would you
say to your 17‑year‑old self ?”
“I replied, ‘I’m really sorry, but at
17, there was nothing you could say to
me.’ I’ve been thinking about that for
a week and a half,” Grisel says. “I want
to be helpful.”
She could do worse than give him a
copy of her book.
Addicted: Judith Grisel, above right,
as a teenager. Below, now Grisel
is a professor of psychologyGETTY IMAGES; DUSTIN FENSTERMACHERFEATURES
‘The bitter truth
about biology is
that we’re not all
created equally’
Never Enough: The Neuroscience and
Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel
(£9.99, Scribe)Mission
accomplished:
Liv Thorne used a
Danish sperm bank
to conceive her son
Herb, left; Zoe
King, above, is
using ‘matching’
websites and
social media to
find a donorJOHN LAWRENCEclinic fees, she started looking for a
sperm donor online. “I found one via a
matching website, and another closer
to home through a local Facebook
group for sperm donors. You really can
find anything on Facebook, it turns
out,” she laughs.
Though private sperm donation
is legal, there are calls for matching
websites to be regulated, following
reports of women being harassed,
attacked or coerced into sex when they
meet up with prospective donors.
“We do a lot of moderation on
our site for this reason, kicking off
problematic users,” says Harrison.
“We used to be free, but moving to a
paid subscription model seems to have
helped, as well.”
Zoe says she went into private
donation with her eyes wide open and
took precautions. “I would only ever
meet them in public places – often
I’d be in my car, so if I felt in any way
uncomfortable I could just drive away.
“Just like Tinder, there are a lot of
men out there who are just in it for sex.
They’ll insist on what’s known in the
community as ‘natural insemination’- sex, in other words. Some will try to
persuade you that you’re more likely
to get pregnant that way. I would only
talk to donors happy to do artificial
insemination. In my case, it’s all been
very polite.”
There have also been concerns
raised about the health implications
as – unlike sperm donated via
HFEA‑regulated clinics – samples are
not screened for sexually transmitted
infections, HIV, hepatitis B and C,
and inherited conditions such as
Huntington’s disease.
“I would be very concerned about
anyone doing this,” says Dr Amin Gorgy,
a consultant gynaecologist and director
of the Fertility & Gynaecology Academy
in London. “Even if someone going
through a clinic wants to use a known
sperm donor, the sperm has to be
frozen and subjected to specific checks
for disease twice, once at the beginning
and then again three months later.
“And both parties really need to have
counselling. Are they in agreement on
where they stand in terms of things
like legal obligations, for example?”
he adds. (Whereas a donor sourced
through a sperm bank or licensed clinic
has no legal rights or responsibilities
to any children conceived, the position
is less clear when a child is conceived
using a known or private donor.)
Zoe, however, is sanguine.
“Ultimately, you have to make a
judgment – in the case of my second
donor, I knew from the Facebook
group that several women he’d donated
to had had healthy babies. You have
to find your own level of what you’re
comfortable with. In that respect,
it’s no different from sleeping with
someone you meet on Tinder. Even in
a long‑term relationship, you’re nevercompletely protected – a partner can
still cheat.”
The Donor Conception Network
says it supports women who use
sperm donors, whether through
a private arrangement or via the
regulated channels. “We welcome
anyone, from any family – all we
would say is do your research,” says
spokeswoman Lucia Grounds, who is
a solo parent herself. “We encourage
openness and honesty, so ideally
children should be told from an early
age and told often, throughout their
development. It should never be
something they find out as a shock.”
Liv Thorne says she will be open
with her son about how he was
conceived. “I don’t want him to think
it’s something odd or dirty, because
it isn’t. Becoming a parent this way
might not have been my first choice
– but having Herb is without a doubt
the single best decision I’ve made.”For information, see the Donor
Conception Network: dcnetwork.orgThe Daily Telegraph Thursday 22 August 2019 *** 21
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