The book Memoirs of an Addicted Brain follows Marc Lewis and his adventures in doing different types of drugs. Marc goes to boarding school in Boston, Tabor, where he was homesick and being bullied by the other children. Marc starts doing drugs to fit in. He started using legal drugs like cough medicine and alcohol but progressed to doing more illegal drugs like marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine, and LSD. The more illegal drugs were accessible at the Berkeley university since there was a large hippie movement.
Marc first gets caught when he meets his friend Schwartz at LaGuardia airport. They were planning to go to Puerto Rico, but all the flights were canceled. Marc was a little disappointed and decided that he wanted to smoke marijuana at that moment. So, Marc went to the restaurant’s bathroom and decided to smoke there. However, he got caught by the
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He seemed to get off relatively easily when he was doing marijuana in the restaurant’s bathroom. Six months of probation does not seem too drastic for being in possession and using an illegal drug in a public place. I think it might have been because he was a white male. I do not feel that he would have had the same punishment if he had been a black, man. Martin Luther King Jr. was still finding for the rights of African-Americans in the 1950s. Some African American students were still not allowed to go to school with white students because of segregation. I think that if Marc had been a black man that he would have been sent to jail for several years.
2. I think that it was stupid of Marc to keep taking drugs after his overdose and after learning of Jim’s death due to an overdose. Marc should have tried a little bit harder at driving trucks or working at the insurance company. I feel that his stupidity illustrates how much the drugs have taken over his mind. He does not even seem to reflect a lot on Jim’s death even though earlier in the book he could not stop describing how much he loved the