Rat Park

 

Dr. Bruce Alexander, a psychologist who recently retired after thirty-five years at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, says since addiction is stimulated by environmental factors drug policies don’t work. 200 Alexander says, “The only way we’ll ever touch the problem of addiction is by developing and fostering viable culture.”

In the late 1970s, Alexander ran a series of elegant experiments he calls “Rat Park”. The conclusion he reached was that drugs, even hard drugs like heroin and cocaine, do not cause addiction; the user’s environment does. Like a lot of research that goes against the prevailing grain, Alexander’s work was mostly ignored. People were so convinced that drugs cause addiction they couldn’t see any other cause.

It turns out that all the animal drug experiments were carried out in confined Skinner boxes where a surgically implanted catheter is hooked up to a drug supply that the animal self-administers by pressing a lever. There is no lack of experiments showing that lab animals readily became slaves to such drugs as heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines, which was the proof that drugs are irresistible and addictive. When Alexander did his own drug experiments he built a paradise for rats and called it Rat Park. He created a plywood enclosure the size of 200 standard cages. Floors were covered with cedar shavings; there were boxes and tin cans for hiding and nesting, climbing poles, and no lack of food. Most important, because rats live in colonies, Rat Park housed sixteen to twenty animals of both sexes.

Alexander also ran a parallel experiment with control animals in standard laboratory cages. Both groups of rats had access to two water bottles, one filled with plain water and the other with morphine-laced water. It became obvious that the residents of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred plain water to morphine (the test produced statistical confidence levels of over 99.9 percent). Alexander tried to seduce his rats with sugared morphine water but, Rat Parkers drank far less than the caged rats. The only thing that made the Rat Parkers drink morphine was when Alexander added naloxone, which eliminates morphine’s narcotic effects. The Rat Parkers wanted the sweet water, but not if it made them high.

In his “Kicking the Habit” experiment, Alexander allowed both groups of rats only morphine-laced water for fifty-seven days, until they were physically dependent on the drug. But as soon as they had a choice between plain water and morphine, the Rat Parkers “switched to plain water more often than the caged rats did, voluntarily putting themselves through the discomfort of withdrawal to do so.”

Alexander’s “Rat Park showed that a rat’s environment, not the availability of drugs, leads to dependence. In a normal setting, a narcotic is an impediment to what rats typically do: fight, play, forage, and mate. But a caged rat can’t do those things. It’s no surprise that a distressed animal with access to narcotics would use them to seek relief.”

Unfortunately, both Science and Nature rejected Alexander’s work. As I mentioned earlier, this type of research goes against the prevailing grain and one reviewer said “I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong, but I know it’s got to be wrong.” The Rat Park papers were published in reputable psychopharmacology journals but not the ones that most people read.

In the ensuing years Alexander has proven by reading every paper on addiction that humans become addicted for the same reasons as rats. He’s written books and papers, delivered speeches, and testified before the 2001–2002 Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs.

“His message — that the core values of Western life have created an environment of rootlessness and spiritual poverty that leads more and more of us to addiction — is Rat Park writ large. And by addiction, Alexander means a great deal more than illegal drugs. There are the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, of course. Then there’s gambling, work, shopping, the Internet, and anorexia (“addiction to starvation,” as Alexander puts it). Research is showing that as far as the brain is concerned, these activities are drugs, too, raising levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, just like alcohol, heroin, and almost every other addictive substance we know. In this broad — but not loose — sense of the word, addiction is not the preserve of a coterie of social outcasts, but rather the general condition of Western society.”

“Naturally, these indictments have not for the most part been warmly received, but Alexander is used to that. For years, he’s worked outside the mainstream, without funding, in the face of professional ridicule. The resistance, he says, is based on a pervasive “temperance mentality” that has made drugs — first alcohol, then opium, morphine, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana — the scapegoat for society’s ills for centuries. ‘We’re bathed in this propaganda from childhood, and it’s totally persuasive,” he says. “It’s so much easier to believe that the drug takes people away than that the very civilization we live in is making life miserable for everybody.’”

Quote from the book Death by Modern Medicine: Seeking Safe Solutions