This remarkable true story was told live in London. Radcliffe lost his home, his job and his wife in 24 hours. Drugs numbed the pain but resulted in prison and rock bottom, before finding his way back.

Synopsis (contains spoilers):

• Radcliffe arrived home to discover the key the family home didn't work, his wife had changed the locks.
• A friend offered comfort and a sofa to stay on as well as drugs, life suddenly felt better.
• Overspent his welcome and became homeless.
• Lived in a skip in Soho with a guy called Delroy who had a spider tattoo on his face.
• Stole food to fuel drug habit. One day stole a leg of lamb with a tracking device in it and got caught.
• Tried to rob a bank in Chelsea - only when he got around to it on Sunday, the bank was shut.
• A have-a-go-hero parked a van on his feet, broke his toes. Arrested.
• Sent to Wandsworth Prison in South London.
• Went to Hospital (Chelsea and Westminster) for treatment, in Victorian shackles.
• While shackled to two police officers was spotted my ex's wife's cousin manning a friends of the hospital stand. 
• Both were shocked and this was the beginning of a new life for Radcliffe who lives to tell the tale in an eloquent, shocking and chilling way.

First: B-Side's Tamara Keith cooks up a pot of her mom's vegetarian lentil soup and explores food and our relationship to food. Then: We visit a bar. It's the kind of place where you can get a strong drink a disappear. And it seems the appropriate location to do a show about coping. That's what half of the show is all about: the things we do to deal with the unexpected, the unpleasant, the sometimes miserable parts of life. Liner Notes "The Gastronauts" Jody Avirgan: The Gastronauts are a group of adventurous eaters who like to push their culinary limits and explore the most exotic food New York City has to offer. Just what makes these guys hop the subway to seek out giant Nigerian snails, lamb eyeballs and live, squirming octopus? We'll find out. "Take me Out...to Dinner" Donovan Keith: Donovan Keith is on a strict diet. His food intake is carefully planned and regulated. He's even signed up with a personal trainer at the local gym. But he's not, trying to lose weight: he's trying to put on 30 pounds of muscle for a regional theater production of Take Me Out. "Spam?" Rene Gutel : Sometimes food can be a dividing line because what you eat, or what you don't eat, can say a lot about you. It can speak to your tastes, your socioeconomic status, how you were raised. It gets kind of complicated and touchy and emotional. Rene Gutel found all this out not long ago. She's a reporter in Phoenix, and also a newlywed. Her husband is John Tynan We'll let them tell you the story. "Retail Therapy " Claudine Zap: Claudine found that for her the best place to cope with a loss wasn't a bar, but a shopping mall. For her, shopping couldn't bring back the dead, it couldn't make the pain disappear but it could help her forget, at least for a little while. "T-Shirt Addiction" Rob Sachs: Sometimes coping with a loss is hardest when the thing you love is slowly fading away. That's what literally what happens for our next contributor Rob Sachs. Rob is a self-proclaimed tee-shirt aficionado who's spent countless hours scouring thrift shops for the coolest in vintage fashion. But with each washing Rob's faced with the inevitable reality that his precious tees won't last forever. "After the Dumpster" Elizabeth Chur: Many people might need to do a bit of spring cleaning. But for some, the sheer volume of their possessions reaches epidemic proportions. You might never know from someone's outward appearance that they have a problem with hoarding and cluttering. But their piles of papers, books, clothing, food, and other belongings often reach from floor to ceiling and endanger their safety and their ability to function. In this story we hear from one such person who has struggled with clutter for decades. This story was originally produced for Transom.org. "Kitty Prozac" Kristi Birch: This story starts with a woman, who decides to get a cat. Then the cat decides to cause some trouble...and the situation gradually spirals towards absurdity.

Christian Rivera was a champion, among the best in his league. He won large cash prizes, had major corporate sponsors and fans around the world. But you won’t hear about Christian Rivera on ESPN because he’s a professional gamer: his sport happens completely online.

Rivera plays something called League of Legends , a multiplayer online game set in a fantasy world. The game involves two teams fighting against each other via avatar “Champions,” such as Alistar the minotaur, and Evelynn the assassin. A team wins once they’ve raided and destroyed the other team’s base.

In an annual report, market research firm DFC Intelligence listed League of Legends as the most played PC game in North America and Europe.  The creators of League of Legends, Riot Games, say 32 million people play the game for more than a billion hours each month.

Most players of League of Legends do so over the Internet from the comfort of their homes. But for professional gamers like Rivera, competition happens in public “cyber arenas” with large crowds watching both in person and online. Teams compete for enough big money that the game is their full-time job.

Christian Rivera was on one such team. The was buzz that they were even on their way to becoming one of those world champions in this year’s season of competitive play. But at the end of last year, Rivera’s ambitions were suddenly put on hold as Riot Games made an unprecedented announcement to ban him from competing in its top tournament for one year. The charges against him? In-game harassment, verbal abuse, and offensive language.

The one year ban from this virtual sport has real world consequences for Rivera’s life and finances. He’ll have to start his climb to the top all over again, winning far less money along the way. And since the average pro gaming career lasts only five years, Rivera may never get back to where he was before burning out.

Never before had a League of Legends player—let alone a professional player—been punished so drastically for behavior while playing the game. The body that handed down Rivera’s sentence was something called the Tribunal, a “virtual judiciary” that is built into League of Legends . A panel of Rivera’s skilled gaming peers reviewed the evidence against him and decided the punishment.

Riot Games and other makers of multiplayer online games could just outright delete the accounts of troublesome players like Rivera from their games. Online games are not democracies, after all. But quasi-judicial processes like the Tribunal do exist within many multiplayer online games. Simon Ferrari, a doctoral student at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says that to understand how they came to be, you first need to know more about the history of virtual crime in virtual worlds.

“It’s this kind of experimental look at a model and almost an alternate history. Like, given a society that doesn’t have law, can we record first-hand as this changes to a more democratic system? Because we’ve only got incomplete records of what has happened in real world nations in the past,” Ferrari says.

Online gaming has been around since the late 1970s, with most of the earliest multiplayer online games modeled on the old pen-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons fantasy game. Players interacted with each other via rudimentary text-based chat rooms inputting commands that would display certain actions to other players. Ferrari explains.

“So, if my character’s name was Simon [and] I wrote ‘talk: hello everyone,’ – then the game would tell everyone in the room: ‘Simon says hello everyone’. The other command was emote – to express action or emotion. So if I type ‘emote: feels very happy today,’ everyone in the room would read, ‘Simon feels very happy today.’”

As with Dungeons and Dragons , players had to use their imaginations to get the most out of the game. Some highly skilled players could even program new elements into the game. Typically, they’d craft dramatic narratives or magical items that other players could then interact with in good faith they’d be taken on a rollicking quest for treasure and glory. But in the early 1990s, Ferrari says, that norm was violated inside one game’s most public chat room.

“One night, a character called Mr. Bungle entered the living room with an item described as a “voodoo doll”—kind of a digital voodoo doll.” The so-called voodoo doll was in fact a programming hack that commandeered the game. Ferrari continues, “The problem with Mr. Bungle possessing this voodoo doll was that he was able to fake emotes from other players. And using that ability he created this scene where multiple women within the game were seen violating themselves and each other in horrific and graphic ways.”

Eventually, the game’s developers stopped Mr. Bungle’s grisly scene, but his actions had real world effects on the game’s community. An article later written in The Village Voice about the incident described what Mr. Bungle had done as “cyberrape.” One woman whose character was violated by Mr. Bungle said she suffered from bouts of post-traumatic stress following the attack.

Following the event, players of the game had to come together to figure out how to punish Mr. Bungle, and keep other virtual crimes like his from being committed again. At first, they called for the erasure of Mr. Bungle from the game, but the game’s developers hesitated. They knew that as the game became more popular, more malicious players could be drawn to it. And the developers  knew didn’t have the time or manpower to hear every case and ban every player who acted horribly.

So after some deliberation, they decided to create one of the very first “virtual judiciaries” to deter future in-game crime. “It was basically an adjudication or arbitration system,” Ferrari says. “This was a way of asking one uninterested third party to come in and judge the facts of a case—like in the case of a virtual rape—and determine if there was fault and what the punishment should be.”

With video games, reviewing the facts of a case is the easy part. “Factual evidence is recorded at all times by the game system itself,” Ferrari says. “Every movement of a player: you know exactly where two given players are at any given time. So unlike the real world, where so much of the judicial process is built around this fact that you have firsthand accounts […] delivered via people’s memories and voices that cause all these problems and doubts; in a virtual world, there’s never that doubt. You see it.”

In the case of League of Legends’ Tribunal, if players can find a reported player guilty by majority vote, usually the reported player’s username and IP address are banned for a few days. Their “harassment score”—a metric used by the game to track problem players over time—also goes up. Usually all that is enough for most players to check themselves next time they log onto the game.

Christian Rivera, however, had been through the Tribunal nine times and punished eight. Rivera’s accumulated harassment score at this time had him among the worst-behaved of all North American players and the number one worst ranked pro player. The trouble for these virtual worlds is that problematic players like Mr. Bungle and Christian Rivera tend to spread negativity, bringing out the worst in other players. Game makers will tell you that they want to discourage behavior like this in order to help bring about a sort of virtual world peace.

But Rutgers University law professor Greg Lastowka says that game makers’ motivations aren’t just altruistic. “If a company focuses on the short term and disregards certain users just in order to make a buck, I think that may be profitable in the short term, but ultimately it’s going to mean that the platform has less respect,” he says. Less respect means fewer people want to play to the game.

Lastowka is author of Virtual Justice, a book exploring the social phenomenon of multiplayer online games and how they relate to the law. He believes that “virtual judiciaries” play an important role in keeping real world courts out of the gaming picture

“To the extent that a game company creates clear rules that people understand, that people respect, and doesn’t act in arbitrary ways and gives some degree of due process to gamers when they’re accused of violating rules, then that actually makes the community more healthy and makes the company more profitable,” Lastowka says

After the League of Legends Tribunal banned him from the Championship Series, Christian Rivera released a statement. In it, he apologized for offending other players and his fans. He said he understands professional players are role models and should act accordingly. And he vowed the ban won’t end his aspirations as a professional player.

“League of Legends is my life, and I will do everything in my power to play as long as possible,” he said.

HOST: Today we hear from a professor at Cornell University, Roald (ROE ? ald) Hoffmann. He is a chemist and a Nobel Prize Winner. He is also a poet and playwright. Straddling the worlds of science and art is comfortable for Hoffmann. In fact, that position?in between?is where he finds his own center. Here is Roald Hoffmann with his essay for This I Believe. ESSAY: I believe in the middle. Extremes may make a good story, but the middle satisfies me. Why? Perhaps because I?m a chemist. Chemistry is substances, molecules and their transformations. And molecules fight categorization?they are poised along several polarities. Harm and benefit is one. Take morphine: Anyone who's had an operation knows what morphine is good for. But it?s also a deadly, addictive drug. Take ozone: Up in the atmosphere, a layer of ozone protects us from the harmful ultraviolet radiation of our life-giving sun. But at sea level, ozone is produced in photochemical smog; it chews up tires and lungs. Chemistry?like life?is deeply and fundamentally about change. It?s about substances, say A and B, transforming, becoming a different substance, C and D, and coming back again. At equilibrium?the middle?all the substances are present. But we're not stuck there. We can change the middle; we can disturb the equilibrium. Perhaps I like the middle, that tense middle, because of my background. I was born in 1937 in southeast Poland, now Ukraine. Our Jewish family was trapped in the destructive machinery of Nazi anti-Semitism. Most of us perished: my father, three of foury grandparents, and so on. My mother and I survived, hidden for the last 15 months of the war in a schoolhouse attic by a Ukrainian teacher, Mikola Dyuk. We were saved by the action of a good man, that schoolteacher. Sad to say, much of the Ukrainian population in the region behaved badly in those terrible times. They helped the Nazis kill us. And yet?and yet?some, like Dyuk, saved us at great risk to their lives. I couldn?t formulate it then, as a child, but I knew from our experience that people were not simply good or evil. They made choices. You could hide a Jewish family or you could choose not to. Every human being has the potential to go one way or the other. Understanding that there was a choice helps me live with the evil that I experienced. Being a chemist has helped me to see plainly that things?politics, attitudes, molecules?in the middle can be changed, that we have a choice. Being a survivor I can see that choices really matter, all part of this risky enterprise of being human. The middle is not static?my psychological middle as well as the chemical equilibrium. I like that. Yes, of course I also want stability. But I believe that extreme positions?the things you start out with in a chemical reactions, the things you finish with (all people A bad, all people B good, no taxes at all, taxed to death)?all of these are impractical, unnatural, boring: the refuge of people who never want to change. The world is not simple, though God knows political forces on every side want to make it so. I like the tense middle, and I am grateful for a life that offers me the potential for change.

On this edition of B-side, host Tamara Keith visits a bar. It's the kind of place where you can get a strong drink a disappear. And it seems the appropriate location to do a show about coping. That's what this edition of B-side is all about?the things we do to deal with the unexpected, the unpleasant, the sometimes miserable parts of life. Liner Notes "Retail Therapy " Claudine Zap: Claudine found that for her the best place to cope with a loss wasn't a bar, but a shopping mall. For her, shopping couldn't bring back the dead, it couldn't make the pain disappear?but it could help her forget, at least for a little while. . "T-Shirt Addiction" Rob Sachs: Sometimes coping with a loss is hardest when the thing you love is slowly fading away. That's what literally what happens for our next contributor Rob Sachs. Rob is a self-proclaimed tee-shirt aficionado who's spent countless hours scouring thrift shops for the coolest in vintage fashion. But with each washing Rob's faced with the inevitable reality that his precious tees won't last forever. "After the Dumpster" Elizabeth Chur: Many people might need to do a bit of spring cleaning. But for some, the sheer volume of their possessions reaches epidemic proportions. You might never know from someone's outward appearance that they have a problem with hoarding and cluttering. But their piles of papers, books, clothing, food, and other belongings often reach from floor to ceiling and endanger their safety and their ability to function. In this story we hear from one such person who has struggled with clutter for decades. This story was originally produced for Transom.org. "Kitty Prozac" Kristi Birch: This story starts with a woman, who decides to get a cat. Then the cat decides to cause some trouble...and the situation gradually spirals towards absurdity.

Happy Black Friday everyone! Let Distillations keep you company on your drive over to the mall. In this episode, producer Sheri Quinn visits her shopaholic mom to explore how your brain reacts when you start to buy—and why for some this leads to a full-fledged addiction. Then producer Lindsay Patterson examines a chemical found in printer paper that some researchers are concerned might be hazardous to your health.

Jeremy interviews Mark about addiction. Listeners hear frank talk about the pull of addiction from recovering addicts. This piece originally aired on Blunt at WMPG in Portland, ME.

Alan, who wishes to remain anonymous, smoked crystal meth for 5 years and actually kept his life under control during that time. He switched over to injecting meth and then his life went to hell. After getting fired from a couple of jobs, he checked himself into rehab and got himself clean. He speaks candidly of what meth is like, how it affected him and what it feels like to be clean.

Organizations often do special events without considering opportunity costs.

A suburban family?s secret struggle with an uncommon addiction comes to light in this personal essay by Laura Mirsch.

Food addiction may be a major cause of obesity.  What are the causes of food addiction and how can they be overcome?  On this program, Hedley Turk discussed why intelligent people are overweight.

The trauma of growing up with a mentally ill sister or brother is often overshadowed by the illness itself. But siblings on the sidelines of mental illness can suffer life-long consequences. This documentary explores their experiences, in the context of research on a "well sibling syndrome." It also features two intimate portraits: a mother caring for one young daughter with bipolar disorder, alongside two other children; and twin sisters -- one with schizophrenia, the other without. Winner of three national awards.

Over the years, Radio Rookie Tim has fought, sometimes physically, with his family and struggled to become who he wants to be.  Since he was a child, he’s been diagnosed with everything from ADD, ADHD, PTSD, depression, to bipolar disorder.  But he doesn’t think any of those labels fit him and he’s not sure if he’s mentally ill at all.  Tim’s radio story prompted Harvard Professor Paula Caplan, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care, to write in to say ask Tim to serve as an ambassador for the Founadation.  In her letter she wrote, “We were struck by the clarity and power of how he spoke, and we feel that what he said could have far more impact than much of the dialogue and debate among professionals in the field.”  

Humans have always used drugs, but current level of drug abuse could indicate a bigger problem that we’re driving people into addiction.  What’s the connection between the increase in chronic diseases, mental illness and drug addiction in our society today? On this edition, Dr. Gabor Maté talks about the relationship between mind and body health – and what the rise of capitalism has done to destroy both.

Special thanks to KPFA in Berkeley, CA.

Dr. George Uhl, Adjunct Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience and Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Univeristy.
Dr. Uhl discusses addictions, genes and the brain. 

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