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What causes drug addiction? Easy! Addictive substances. You take heroin and you’ll become an addict for sure, right? This is the narrative that our society teaches us. It is the reason why we treat addicts like criminals, blaming them for the choice they have made when they could have just as easily chosen a normal, conventional life, like everyone else.
But what if it’s not that easy or simple?
The Rat Park Experiment
In 1970, Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia conducted a study that directly challenged the common notion that drugs are themselves the cause of addiction.
They put lab rats in small separate cages, each with two water dispensers; one of them filled with pure water and the other with water mixed with heroin or cocaine. The rats would end up compulsively pressing the drug dispensing lever again and again, even to the point of choosing it over food. Soon enough, they would starve themselves to death. Sounds like the typical drug addict behavior, right?
But the study doesn’t end there. Alexandre and his team built what one could call a “Rat Paradise.” Instead of isolating rats in small separate cages, they let them interact with each other in an environment 200 times more spacious than a standard laboratory cage — with plenty of food, toys, wheels, and space to mate. Their behavior and choices changed dramatically.
The rats in the rat park resisted the drugged water and chose pure water instead. Even already-addicted rats weaned themselves off their addiction after they were transferred from cages to the rat park.
This begs the question: were rats really hopeless addicts, or simply unhappy? Were they reacting to the drug itself, or to their confined, isolated, and depressing environment?
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
Modern Society: The Antithesis To Human Happiness
The same question should be asked about human beings. Perhaps it is not the drug itself that some find addictive, but the fact that it is a temporary escape to this sick and depressing society we have built for ourselves. Authorities continue to glorify the War on Drugs with strict laws, fear-based education, and severe punishment for drug use… while completely disregarding how our society’s very structure is designed for unhappiness.
Think about it: the standard human life consists of spending the best years of our lives bored out of our minds in school only to prepare us for a job we will most likely hate, and then retire at 60 when we’re too old and tired to do the things we would have actually wanted to do.
“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”
– Ellen Goodman
I don’t know about you, but this to me sounds a lot like a little cage in which there is no time or space to enjoy ourselves, act on our deepest calling, and feel a sense of community among fellow human beings — which I believe is key to human happiness and fulfillment. This is not to say that choosing the drug over reality is the right choice, but it is, in essence, just as reasonable as the poor rats’ decision to go for “feel good” chemicals rather than stay sober inside of a prison. Both the drug-addicted rat and human are hurting… and pain needs compassion and understanding, not punishment.
It is interesting to note that Bruce Alexander’s discovery was ignored and suppressed for many years. Perhaps because taking a good look at our own human environment — instead of policing our reactions to it — may spark the revolution that those in power fear. The difference between our human society and a rat cage is that we have a choice.
We can continue living by the rules even though they make us miserable. We can continue escaping our feelings with substances to better cope with the way things are. Or… we can turn to each other and realize that we are the ones powering this entire society. How about we stop that and instead power up the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible?
“If you feel like you don’t fit in, in this world, it is because you are here to help create a new one.”
– Jocelyn Daher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg
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I do get it that many people who become addicted to hard drugs are lonely and feeling depressed, before they develop their need of a fix. I’ve witnessed addicts in my neighbourhood, in the 70’s and I’ve seen the physical reaction, called “cold turkey” in those that are in great need for it.
This is meant as an example of personal experience and not to show off. I’ve assisted an addict to stop using, by keeping him company during 3 days at Xmas, 1975. He had told me of his concern, that he felt like on a boundary of no return. He wasn’t a longtime user yet. He agreed to give it a try and stop using. We didn’t talk, he sat in silence on his chair, we ate our meals together and slept in the same home. I had promised him (after a period of 8 weeks) to buy him an Olivetti typewriter, he was fond of writing, when he managed to stop using.
It proved to be well worth it, my investment in that typewriter. Since the day, after completing those 8 weeks, I took him to the place where his present stood waiting for him, he has never touched it again. Soon after he met his future wife and after a while he was a father. I felt happy for his achievement and he managed to end his study on the Academy of Art, using his creativity to express his emotions. It’s where we met. I’ve no idea why it was such a success, I must have believed in him thoroughly.
I’ve witnessed once how an addict gave himself a shot, observed him, when the substance took hold of him and saw him change into a lively gesturing chatty guy, almost mechanical in his behavior. Coldness came over him, a strange sort of indifference. It made me feel disconnected, as if he suddenly had entered another world. Which was true, of course, for it’s a state of out-of-body that provides for the absence of pain and emotions. It’s a ticket to heaven and it ends often in a one way ticket to it at the point of no return, when the body can’t cope with that sort of bungy jumping.
I’ve heard explanations about addiction on hard drugs, the effect of a high in extremes, replaced by a plunge into sobriety and the familiar despair, each time deeper, which causes the anxiety for more of that heavenly stuff. That loop is hard to break through, for addicts create a network and help each other out in many ways. Even those that provide for a fix are “supporters” in and of that network.
Working in a shop, in a mall at a railway station, I’ve witnessed drugdealers who secured addicts of their fix, bringing food for them later on, dealing the instant-dinners on plates from their carboots, in order to keep their clients on their feet, securing their continuing profit.
Addicts don’t care for spiritual values as long as their blood is crawling, in need of brown sugar or crack. Thanks to witnessing that addict world, I’ve never for one second considered using that stuff.
Besides, I was already pretty high flying, by being my usual me, myself and I, a holy trinity 😉
Very inspiring words Baghor, thanks for sharing, Amen to what you do…
Thank you, Edward, I’m the kind of maverick who tries to cover up my good deeds and do good in invisibility, in shyness of praise, for there’s this part of me that finds it easier and very tempting to put an extra cover on it, by being the jester, a mother superior or a snow-queen. Pushing people away when they catch a glimpse of it. I must have gone
through a traumatic experience once upon a time, in realms of affairs around Initation.
Resulting in my need to protect something that is very vulnerable and unsure. It’s beginning to dawn on me, slowly and gradually, how I’ve created my “ball-book” with appointments, the dance partners who would arrive on the dance floor with me, for the dance of life, before I arrived in my cloth-of-many-colors, made of rags. Ummpph, here I go again, ha ha.
In another timeline, I guess I’m that typical shining schoolkid, showing bravery in the playground, big-mouthed, popular and bossy, while suffering the bullying of disturbed parents at home. The best of Charles Dickens characters, don’t you agree?
Indeed!
Heartbreaking. I worked with junks. There’s no lonelier world.