Doctor Claims Cure for Alcoholism in a Pill

Dec. 9, 2008— -- A French cardiologist says he has discovered a cure for alcoholism and ended his own decades-long addiction to alcohol by dosing himself with a drug usually used for treating muscle spasms.

Dr. Olivier Ameisen, 55, a French physician who practiced for a time at New York's Weill-Cornell Medical Center claims in his new book "Le Dernier Verre" ("The Last Glass") that since he started taking the drug baclofen, he has lost his desire to consume alcohol.

The book, a best-seller in France slated for release in the United States next year under the title "The End of My Addiction," has caused a stir on both sides of the Atlantic, with some doctors cautiously optimistic about the drug's results in lab tests and others warning that no single drug can cure alcoholism's many root causes.

Despite a lucrative cardiology practice he began in 1994, Amesein writes that he felt like "an impostor waiting to be unmasked." The doctor writes that he drank large quantities of whiskey and gin, though he hated the taste of alcohol.

"I detested the taste of alcohol, but I needed its effects to exist in society," he writes in the book.

Ameisen writes that he began using baclofen, a muscle relaxant typically used to treat muscle spasms in people with multiple sclerosis, after reading a 2000 New York Times article about how the drug cured a cocaine addict of his addiction after he was prescribed the drug for a muscle problem.

"We've been interested in baclofen to treat alcoholism for years and continue to study its effects," said Dr. James Garbutt, a researcher at the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

Garbutt said two different clinical tests of the drug to treat alcohol addiction in humans yielded different, inconclusive results, but that the drug was "not just snake oil.

"There is a fair amount of evidence that the drug does something. The basic science is sound, and it's been shown to work in animals," Garbutt said. "There is a good amount of good science that has shown good results, but there are still many, many questions. How effective is it really? What's the right dose? How safe is it? Will it work for everyone?"