An Officer and a Junkie: From West Point to the Point of No Return

Readers may find it hard to sympathize with Winder, who manages to graduate from West Point, gain an honorable discharge from the military and get accepted into one of the top law schools in the nation—all while maintaining a daily regimen of alcohol, GHB, LSD, cocaine and prescription drug cocktails. But that is the point of his memoir: to dispel the myth that addicts are necessarily “losers and failures.” Emphasizing the episodic in straightforward narrative, Winder vividly captures defining moments in his life as an addict, describing how his abuse of alcohol to escape the pressures of school escalated to a full dependence on drugs to compensate for his feelings of social and physical self-consciousness. At one point, he was using cocaine and Hydroxycut to battle the chronic fatigue of his alcohol binges; Xanax for the shaking and anxiety of the cocaine and Hydroxycut; Prozac for depression; steroids for energy and motivation to stay in shape; and Valium for sleep. While the picture Winder paints of himself is not pretty, it succeeds in capturing the self-centeredness and paranoia of an addict's life. (Mar.)