Rat Park: Addiction and the Chemical Hook Myth

It don't make no difference escaping one last time, it's easier to believe. In this sweet madness, oh this glorious sadness, that brings me to my knees.

- Sarah McLachlan, Angel

Addiction runs in my family. And while I’ve never found myself on the thorny end of the addiction stick, I’ve learned something while witnessing the trauma of loved ones impaled on theirs. Addictive behaviour is just that. Behaviour. It’s not the sum of ones being. People are addicted, they are not their addiction. And in a world high on clickbait, binge-drinking, and porn, how far are any of us from our own personal drug?

According to neuroscience, a habit is an action with some level of choice, whereas addiction is compulsive. Fail to feed a habit and you might feel uncomfortable, but people will burn their lives to the ground to feed an addiction. In ancient Greece, the word addiction meant, those not entitled to rights. Put differently, slaves.

And what does the system do with slaves? It punishes them.

In 1971, the President of the United States, Richard Nixon famously declared drug abuse, public enemy number one, going on to say, in order to fight and defeat this enemy, it’s necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive. This offensive eventually led to a series of experiments in which lone rats were placed in cages with two water bottles. One bottle was filled with water, while the other was laced with heroin or cocaine. Nine times out of ten the rat became addicted to the drug-laced water until it eventually died by overdose. These experiments formed the widespread belief that chemical hooks cause the body to become dependent on drugs, leading to addiction.

But there’s something wrong with this narrative.

Amidst the Vietnam war, it was reported some 20% of U.S troops were using heroine. The news horrified officials who feared an impending nation of addicts. On returning to the US, soldiers were monitored in an extensive study. The result? Of the servicemen using heroin in Vietnam, 95% stopped on home soil. But if you believe the steadfast story of addiction, none of this makes sense.

In the 1970’s, Professor Bruce Alexander looked again at the rat experiment. Immediately he noticed the rats had been put in empty cages with nothing to do except use the heroine laced water. Alexander decided to try something different. He built what would later be referred to as, Rat Park. Inside was an abundance of food, toys, tunnels and crucially, other rats to mate with. As before, rats had access to both sets of water. But in Rat Park, the rats hardly used the drugged water and no rat ever overdosed. Rats went from almost 100% overdose when isolated, to 0% when they had fun and connected lives. Alexander concluded there was a different story about addiction. To him, addiction wasn’t about the chemical hooks in your body, it was about your cage. In other words, addiction is an adaptation to our environment.

In his 2015 TED Talk, author Johann Hari expands on this point, sighting Professor Peter Cohen who referred to addiction as bonding. Humans have an innate need to bond. When we’re happy and healthy, we’ll bond with each other, but when we can’t, because we’re isolated or in pain, we’ll bond with anything that’ll grant relief. For addicts, compulsion is a reaction to suffering. But rather than offering an empathetic hand to those who cannot bare to be present, most countries - to some degree - punish and shame addicts as an incentive to stop. We give them criminal records and put barriers between them and society.

Portugal was the first country to recognise this system was broken. Led by Dr. João Goulão, a panel of Portuguese experts were asked to solve the problem of their countries crippling addiction rates. Their radical recommendation was to decriminalise all drugs, from heroine to cannabis, and to put money previously spent on punishing drug users into reconnecting them with society. The government heeded and alongside it’s rehabilitation programmes, launched an initiative of job creation and business loans for addicts. As Hari puts it, the aim was to ensure that every addict had a reason to wake up in the morning, that those once isolated, rediscovered their purpose and bonds with society. Years later, a review was conducted. Injected drug use had halved, overdose reduced, and addiction across all studies diminished. Significantly, almost nobody in Portugal wanted to return to the previous system.

Going back to Professor Alexander, while right to talk about addiction in terms of individual recovery, he urged we also think about social recovery. But in a world plagued by loneliness, in which many have swapped flesh and blood friends for Twitter followers, how real are our connections? Studies show the number of close friends the average person can call upon has been steadily declining since the 1950’s. As Hari points out, we’ve created a society where life for many looks far more like an isolated cage, and far less like Rat Park.

Going back to where we started, loving an addict isn’t easy. But we must discard the approach of threatening addicts with intervention or stigma and remember the success of Portugal’s progressive approach. We need to hold the pain of the addicts in our lives, and rather than threaten their connection to us, deepen it through love, trust, and empathy. As Hari so poignantly points out, this message of togetherness has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts; socially, politically and individually.

Because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection.