Addiction: The View from Rat Park
Bruce K. Alexander,Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University
If you were a cute little white rat…
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| Figure 1 - White Rats |
…you certainly wouldn’t want to live in a psychology laboratory.
When I was an experimental psychologist, between about 1960 and 1980, white laboratory rats had to live in solitary confinement cellblocks like this…
Rat Park versus The New York Times
Bruce K. Alexander
Rat Park closed forever more than 30 years ago. In its heyday, it was a very large plywood box on the floor of my addiction laboratory at Simon Fraser University. The box was fitted out to serve as a happy home and playground for groups of rats. My colleagues and I found that rats that lived together in this approximation of a natural environment had much less appetite for morphine than rats housed in solitary confinement in the tiny metal cages that were standard in those days.
Who could be surprised by this finding? The only people who acted surprised at the time – and a bit offended – were those addiction researchers who believed that the great appetite for morphine, heroin, and cocaine that earlier experiments had demonstrated in rats housed in the tiny solitary confinement cages had proved that these drugs caused permanent addictions in all mammals, including human beings. I call this idea the “Myth of the Demon Drug.” This myth was the backbone of mainstream theories of addiction in those days.
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Extracted from Peele, S. (1985, p. 77-96) The meaning of addiction, Lexington, Mass, USA: DC Heath
The Addicted Animal
The fact that laboratory animals, under the right conditions, will persistently ingest opiates and other drugs has been generalized by many drug commentators to a belief that human beings, along with other mammals, find such drugs inherently rewarding and their use self-perpetuating. This generalization has led to the proposal of metabolic and conditioning theories that support the concept of an inexorable, pharmacological addiction process (see chapter 3). As with other data on drug use and addiction, experimentation with animals yields far more complex results than has been recognized. In particular, research indicates that animals consume opiates only under very limited circumstances. Moreover, research that takes the setting of the animal's drug use into account strongly suggests that many of the same environmental and even psychological mechanisms that playa role in human drug use in fact also do so for animals.
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Olivia Capadose: Dolphins on Drugs: What can animals tell us about getting high? "A lot of us do it. A lot of us don’t. Our governments try their best to present them as the route to all evil while Baudelaire and Lil Wayne have sung their praises. Over the years the drug debate has been exhausted by parliaments and piss-heads alike, but how can animals shed new light on an age-old issue?A lot of us do it. A lot of us don’t. Our governments try their best to present them as the route to all evil while Baudelaire and Lil Wayne have sung their praises. Over the years the drug debate has been exhausted by parliaments and piss-heads alike, but how can animals shed new light on an age-old issue?A lot of us do it. A lot of us don’t. Our governments try their best to present them as the route to all evil while Baudelaire and Lil Wayne have sung their praises. Over the years the drug debate has been exhausted by parliaments and piss-heads alike, but how can animals shed new light on an age-old issue?" CaféBabel, Berlin |
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