rat park

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

Rat Park

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.

Rat Park

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.”

Rat Park

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.

Rat Park

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.

Bruce’s site on rat park

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.

Rat Park

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.” Control groups of rats isolated in small cages consumed much more morphine in this and several subsequent experiments.

Rat Park

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 proved that these drugs were irresistible to all mammals, including human beings.

Bruce’s site on rat park

The two major science journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and Hadaway’s first paper, which appeared instead in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but much smaller journal in 1978. The paper’s publication initially attracted no response. Within a few years, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park’s funding.

Rat Park

The Rat Park experiments, ..flatly contradicted the dominant view of addiction in their day. They quickly disappeared from view, having evoked only negative responses in the mainstream press and journals. Lauren Slater’s controversial psychology book, Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century helped to bring them back to public attention in 2005. These experiments are now widely known and cited.

Bruce Alexander

deserves an intense investigation/revolution/wake-up call.

has been too biased/blinded.. by a sample setof imposterous/negligentical/ginormously-small proportions.

because we’ve assumed ourselves too incapable, too addictive (to ie: drugs, alcohol, violence, war, …) when perhaps we just need the luxury to do something else.

us

us

or the rat

or the cage

us

perhaps this is something we’ve not yet done.. collectively.

intro’d to rat park and Bruce while reading Johann Hari‘s chasing the scream. Johann writes:

We have to build a society that looks more like Rat Park and less like a rat race.

Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4447-4448).

Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

perhaps we try a

for people

a means to get us back to us… ie: a more natural state of non-addiction, et al.