If there's one thing we all learned growing up, it's that drugs are bad. Like, really, really bad. We've been taught that addiction is inevitable, and that addicts are completely irrational.
But you might be surprised to learn that a lot of what we think we know about drugs and addiction comes from a series of studies done in the 1950s and 60s on rats. And it turns out that what we think we know, yeah, it might just be… wrong. This is Bruce Alexander. I'm a psychologist with Simon Fraser University.
Bruce has been studying addiction for almost 50 years. When he started back in the 70s, there was a huge public concern about heroin use and what many at the time described as a growing epidemic. The view was that heroin was essentially a demon drug. If you took it a few times, it would flip a switch in your brain, and you would be forever addicted.
That was it. You were doomed. And it was in the media, it was in the movies.
But in those days, there was also a primary kind of research evidence that was used to support this idea. Much of that research used animal studies, particularly laboratory rats. Rats would be placed in really small cages called Skinner boxes.
A Skinner box is a box which is just about three times the size of a rat. The experiments involved putting rats in Skinner boxes with a needle, which was implanted in their jugular vein, so that if the rats pressed the little lever on the wall, They would get a little surge of heroin in their bloodstream. Press the pedal, get a shot of heroin. Press the pedal, get another shot. And in some cases, they just kept pumping heroin into themselves to the point where they forgot to eat and would die.
Beliefs about rat studies would find their way into PSAs and Hollywood films, and they would become part of our collective understanding of just how dangerous these drugs really were. These experiments seem to show that any creature, including even the lowly rat, If given access to heroin, it would simply take lots and lots of it. But Bruce had another idea. What these experiments really show is that rats who are in solitary confinement will take lots of heroin.
See, rats are very social animals. Rats don't normally spend their lives in harnesses with catheters shoved in their necks. They prefer playing with other rats.
Running around. You know, doing rat stuff. To put a rat in a Skinner box is to make this very, very social creature live a life of solitary confinement.
Bruce and his colleagues wondered if maybe these rats were taking so many drugs because they were living in such an unnatural environment. So he organized his own rat experiment, but with some important differences. Most notably, he built a much bigger enclosure for them.
About half as big as my garage floor, as a matter of fact. Bruce and his colleagues filled it with everything a rat could want. Food, running wheels, and other rats to play with. He called it Rat Park.
His team put a group of rats in the park, and another group of rats in solitary cages. They made morphine freely available to both. The results were eye-opening. Giving the choice between plain water and morphine, the Rat Park residents chose the water. It's not like the rats in Rat Park totally abstained from morphine, but… You could say that they acted more or less like human recreational users of morphine.
Bruce and his colleagues even tried an experiment where the rats in cages were giving nothing but morphine-laced water to drink for 57 days straight. In other words, we made sure they were good and addicted. In terms of the conventional expectation, every one of those rats should have been addicted for the rest of its life.
But when they were placed in Rat Park, those same addicted rats generally chose to drink the plain water and voluntarily went through withdrawal. People were shocked that the rats in Rat Park had So little interest in morphine. The Rat Park study suggested a much more complex picture of addiction than many people had suspected.
Addiction wasn't simply a story of chemicals rewiring our brains or hijacking our reward centers. Other factors like environment, feeling of isolation or hopelessness, poor social bonds and lack of control all likely play an important role in what leads to addiction. Think about the implications for how we've been treating drug addicts. They're often shamed and ostracized, thrown in jail.
moved into halfway houses, instead of integrating them into society, you could say that we're kind of isolating them in cages, like rats. Doesn't seem like such a great idea. And more importantly, it doesn't seem like it's working.
At the time it was published, the Rat Park study was largely ignored, but it's finally starting to gain traction today. It's literally taken 35 years for the Rat Park experiment to find its way into the popular, understanding of addiction. In recent years, other researchers have replicated Bruce's studies and conducted new ones of their own, adding to our increasingly complex understanding of addiction. And that's great.
With concerns over drugs and addiction still dominating the headlines today, a careful analysis and understanding of the research is more vital now than ever. After all, we're never going to get the treatment right if we're getting the diagnosis wrong. Subscribe to our show page and be the first to see new episodes of Wrong.