Quite a life …

… A Neurologist’s Awakenings - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A few years later the author moves to America to pursue his medical career, living initially in California. He still rides his motorbike for hundreds of miles at a time, hangs out with a gang of Hells Angels, frequents Muscle Beach in Los Angeles, and begins using drugs regularly. He is sufficiently dedicated to power-lifting that he breaks the California record for the squat (recall the massive thighs). The sex proceeds sporadically, with one notably awkward incident involving his straight friend Mel. After Mel moves out, Oliver feels lonely and devastated. At this point he seeks escape in drugs, developing a serious four-year addiction to amphetamines: “The doses I took got larger and larger, pushing my heart rate and my blood pressure to lethal heights. There was an insatiability in this state; one could never get enough.” Not until he moves to New York, in 1961, and begins psychoanalysis does his addiction stop. (He has been in analysis for 50 years.)