The Rat Park Heroin Experiment Shows How Society Causes Drug Addiction

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Drug addiction is often blamed on the person or the drugs, but as time goes on, experts are becoming increasingly aware that trauma, loneliness, and depression are some of the major factors that push people towards dangerous lifestyles.

A long forgotten experiment showed the profound impact that someone’s environment has on their possibility of becoming uncontrollably addicted to drugs. The name of the experiment was “Rat Park”. The experiment hoped to show the effect that someone's life and surroundings have on their level of drug use. The study sought to show how there are underlying psychological issues and environmental conditions that play a significant role in someone's path to addiction.

The researchers built a rat colony (Rat Park), which was 200 times the size of a normal laboratory cage, which housed between 16 – 20 rats of both sexes. The researchers wanted to show how rats in captivity handled addiction, in comparison to those who were in much more comfortable environments. There were two groups of rats in the study. There were the rats in Rat Park, who had a lot of room and many options for entertainment and another group of rats that were in very confined and restricted conditions.

The rats in Rat Park were given morphine hydrochloride for 57 straight days in a laboratory cage, where they would develop a physical dependency on the drug. They would then have access to one water bowl which had pure water in it, and another that was laced with the drug. When they were placed in a less stressful environment they no longer used the drug even if it was readily available, but when they were kept in tight captivity they did not have such good luck, these test subjects were far more likely to re-use the drug after the 57-day period.

Wikipedia gives a deeper look into the study:

Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s (and published in 1980) by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Alexander’s hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that “severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can.”[2]

To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating and raising litters.[3]:166 The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. “Nothing that we tried,” Alexander wrote, “… produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment.”[1] Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.

The results of this study paved the way to a better understanding of the societal factors involved with drug use.

The relationship between addiction and loneliness becomes even more complicated in modern society, where most adult social situations revolve around drug use. This means that when people find themselves lonely, their main option for companionship involves drug filled environments, whether they be bars, clubs or parties.

When I trace back my own battles with addiction, it is obvious in my own my mind that I was using drugs as a coping mechanism to deal with deeper psychological and social problems.

Drug abuse cannot be curtailed with the force of the state. However, it can be drastically reduced with knowledge and advancement of societal norms.

See the video below for more information on the experiment:

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THIS WAS A STEEMIT EXCLUSIVE!!

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:

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My name is John Vibes and I am an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. I write for numerous alternative media websites, including The Free Thought Project @tftproject and The Mind Unleashed. In addition to my first book, Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance, I have also co-authored three books with Derrick Broze @dbroze : The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality, Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion and Manifesto of the Free Humans

I just won a 3-year-long battle with cancer, and will be working to help others through my experience, if you wish to contribute to my medical bills, consider subscribing to my podcast on Patreon. 

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