Then, three years into the project, the university’s seed money dried up. Alexander didn’t bother applying for external grants. The near-hysteria about the addictiveness of drugs at that time (“It’s so good, don’t even try it once”) meant funding was reserved for scientists looking for neurochemical, not social, causes and medical, not social, cures. “Our system of science is of course objective on certain levels, it genuinely is, but on the funding level it is highly ideologically directed,” Alexander says. He shut down Rat Park.
“I‘m glad they took away my rats,” Alexander says now, his tone never rising above bemusement. “A hundred years from now, people are going to look back on the addiction science of the beginning of the twenty-first century, and they’re going to see that nine-tenths of it was done on rats, and they’re just going to laugh and laugh.”
It’s not what you’d expect to hear from the father of Rat Park. But Alexander’s experiment tells us about rat behaviour, not human behaviour. That’s why he’s spent the past two decades looking for evidence that drug-induced addiction in humans is also a myth.
Unable to secure funding, Alexander conducted most of his research in the library, where he gathered a mountain of evidence. A survey of Ontario households in 1987, for example, suggested that 95 percent of those who had ever tried cocaine were using it less than once a month. A 1990 survey conducted in the US found that crack cocaine, “the most addictive drug on earth,” was addicting only one user in a hundred. “Naturally, because scholars are scrupulous, I’ve had to try it [morphine] myself,” Alexander says. “It’s no big deal. You’re visibly lightened of pain and anxiety, and that’s mildly pleasant.” But he didn’t experience any urge to try it again. “I just wasn’t interested, and that’s the typical response.”
Then there are the thousands of American soldiers who became heroin addicts during the Vietnam War. In an unrivalled demonstration of the effect of setting, a 1975 survey found that 88 percent of them simply stopped using the drug when they left the war zone. Their experience has been recreated by millions of hospital patients who have received (and become physically dependent on) morphine for severe pain. If opioids are all they’re reputed to be, this practice should have produced legions of addicts. Instead, as researchers have discovered, once patients are no longer in physical distress, they can’t wait to quit the drug, go through the withdrawal period, and get on with their lives. It’s Rat Park’s “Kicking the Habit” experiment carried out on humans, with the same result.
Convincing as these studies are, they remain the outliers of addiction research, which now more than ever endorses neurochemical models, thanks to exquisite new machines that decode genomes and map working brains. “There’s a mainstream that has all the money, sponsored primarily by the American government,” Alexander says. “Those researchers truly believe that they’re dealing with a brain disease, and that they will discover the pill that will solve the problem.”
But if biology alone explained addiction, rates wouldn’t change. A certain fraction of any population would fall predictably into the jaws of addiction, as predestined by flaws in their molecules. Instead, Alexander’s research reveals that addiction rates are low when societies are stable, and they rise at times of social disruption. “The extreme case is the aboriginal people,” he says. “You don’t have anything identifiable as addiction until you screw up their culture, and then alcoholism becomes a major problem. In extreme cases, addiction rates can go from zero to close to 100 percent.”
Such spikes suggest that environment is a stronger determinant of addiction than chemistry. As Alexander puts it, if you put a carton of eggs under a hydraulic press, it’s true some of the eggs will crack before others, but the problem isn’t the eggs. It’s the press.
The years since Rat Park have turned Bruce Alexander into an activist. He’s written books and papers, delivered speeches, and testified before the 2001–2002 Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs (which produced a single report recommending the decriminalization of certain aspects of medical marijuana production and use). His message — that the core values of Western life have created an environment of rootlessness and spiritual poverty that leads more and more of us to addiction — is Rat Park writ large. And by addiction, Alexander means a great deal more than illegal drugs. There are the legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, of course. Then there’s gambling, work, shopping, the Internet, and anorexia (“addiction to starvation,” as Alexander puts it). Research is showing that as far as the brain is concerned, these activities are drugs, too, raising levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, just like alcohol, heroin, and almost every other addictive substance we know. In this broad — but not loose — sense of the word, addiction is not the preserve of a coterie of social outcasts, but rather the general condition of Western society.
Naturally, these indictments have not for the most part been warmly received, but Alexander is used to that. For years, he’s worked outside the mainstream, without funding, in the face of professional ridicule. The resistance, he says, is based on a pervasive “temperance mentality” that has made drugs — first alcohol, then opium, morphine, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana — the scapegoat for society’s ills for centuries. “We’re bathed in this propaganda from childhood, and it’s totally persuasive,” he says. “It’s so much easier to believe that the drug takes people away than that the very civilization we live in is making life miserable for everybody.”
Friday, August 8, 2008
Rat Trap
« page 2 of 2 »
Why Canada’s drug policy won’t check addiction
by Robert Hercz
image courtesy of banksy.co.uk
Published in the December 2007 issue. » BUY ISSUE
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Comments (8 comments)
Dr. Robert B. Coambs: WAR AND PEACE IN THE PALEOZOIC REPTILIAN BRAIN
Dear editor:
Thank you for your fascinating article about Rat Park. Since Drs. Alexander, Hadaway, Beyerstein, and I did this work, Drs. Hadaway and Beyerstein have since passed away, and it is a nice legacy to see the research discussed here.
Since Rat Park days, I have concluded that the Skinner box has mislead us all. Typically, the hungry rat presses a lever to get a food pellet, and this stimulates parts of the brain, including the nucleus accumbens. This is a key "pleasure centre". Humans have this structure, and it is older than the dinosaurs, present in vertebrate tetrapods for more than 250 million years.
However, humans have complex responses to even simple stimuli. We all know how satisfying a big glass of water is on a hot day, and a good meal when we're hungry. But would you like 22 pieces of chocolate cake after the meal? How about a big glass of cold water when it's freezing outside? Perhaps half a bottle of whisky just before your driving test? Why not?
Suddenly we are far past the Skinner box into the real world, where a piece of chocolate cake is only rewarding if you want it. It can be aversive if you really wanted the crème brûlée instead, or you sense that your date, who is on a diet, will suffer while they watch you eat dessert. In humans, pleasure critically depends upon one's circumstances, and it takes many surprising forms. People are pursuing pleasure when they line up for a roller-coaster ride, paying to be scared half to death and giggling with delight in the midst of a cardiovascular crisis. Others are fans of "The Simpsons", where year after year, cartoon characters subject each other to unending emotional abuse. Some people love to be whipped, and others welcome water-boarding.
Most people don't like morphine. If grandma is in cancer treatment, and she has to put up with morphine shots, she will. However, she is glad to stop the shots and go through withdrawal to be back to normal as soon as she can. Morphine addiction in patients with no substance abuse history is so rare that they are difficult or impossible to find. In chronic pain treatment we have great challenges in getting patients to take enough morphine for long enough to control their symptoms and get better. Most of them would rather not, and since pain can cause exhaustion and degrade immune system functions, this can be a serious treatment problem. Even many ex-heroin addicted pain patients use insufficient pain medication. They have given up the drug and they don't want it anymore.
Morphine probably stimulates the nucleus accumbens no matter what mood people are in. However, other parts of the brain seem to channel the signals coming from the nucleus accumbens and they change the signal, modify it, or even block it, depending upon other concurrent brain activities. Frustratingly for brain researchers, human pleasure responses depend upon myriad circumstances that are difficult or impossible to control in the lab. Rat Park just changed one variable (social housing), and the whole morphine-brain-pleasure model fell apart.
Perhaps we could have predicted the outcome. Rat Park created new difficulties and complexities for brain researchers. This apparently blocked stimulation of their pleasure centres.
Dr. Robert B. Coambs
President and CEO,
Health Promotion Research, Inc. November 19, 2007 13:05 EST
Anonymous: The findings of Drs. Alexander, Hadaway, Beyerstein, and Coambs are directly reflected in the philosophy behind the success of addiction treatment in San Patrignano:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://www.sanpatrignano.org/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DSan%2BPatrignano%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG
A similar treatment centre here in Canada has been put forth by BC MLA Lorne Mayencourt, and has been consistently ignored (if not outright condemned) by just about everyone:
http://www.lornemayencourtmla.bc.ca/media/LM~SanPatrignanospeech.pdf November 30, 2007 07:41 EST
Anonymous: As being addicted to cocaine in a relationship that wasnt in anyway healthy, the worst it got the more I seeked to use. Not only was my addiction in cocaine high but my alcohol limits were never met. Prior to this I had no addiction issues and believe did my environment cause this? I have now been out of that environment for some time and have no urges/craving for either. The alcohol/cocaine is like it never existed in my life due to my present social surroundings. One of the problems today is I believe addicts knowing they can go from doctor to doctor and munipilate the system to get what they need for medication. There should be a data base system that everyone that seeks medical attention is placed in just as we are for our driving license. One this will stop repeat offenders from getting medication they dont need and warning doctors of abusers of the system as well as them selves. December 03, 2007 12:49 EST
S.E. Murphy: This is an excellent, thought provoking article, which is atypical in the Drug War hysteria and neo-puritanism that exists these days. I grew up during the "just say no" 80s, when so many of the myths still recounted today reached a fever pitch. I was one of the "true believers" in the drug war, and the addiction fears, and never tried any illicit substances.
I served in counter-drug operations while in the military. After witnessing the waste, the abuse of civil liberties, and the futility, I quit and started examining the economic, social, and political (liberty oriented) arguments against the drug war. They were compelling. Also, I noted that the vast majority of "users" that I grew up with, despite the dire predictions, did not become addicts, went on to and through college, got good jobs, and got on with their lives. A few here and there do still use drugs, but occassionally, not compulsively.
As fate would have it, I suffered crippling injuries in the course of my career. My health deteriorated, and I was left with a chronic pain condition necessitating daily morphine use. It is the oral morphine method of pain relief that offers the best combination of pain relief and minor/no side effects, unlike many other narcotics.
As a pain patient, I notice that I don't get high when taking morphine...ever. I don't have urges, apparent dependency, and even don't mind skipping doses. My pain level fluctuates, and when it is relatively low, I do NOT take any medication, whether on schedule or not. It is interesting to note that despite having been prescribed narcotics off and on for eight years, and daily morphine for the last three, I have no cravings, addictions, etc.
There is all kinds of evidence, as submitted by Dr. Alexander, that demonstrates that social context (stresses, etc.) are powerful determinants of human behavior and addiction tendencies. Where the environment and options are limited, hopeless, and difficult, there is the tendency toward addiction. Whether it is as a soldier in an unpopular and unwinnable war (Vietnam), life as an inmate in a prison, stuck in a dull institution like a public school (for many kids), looking to mentally escape the despair of the slums, or (as this article mentioned) spiritually adrift as has become epidemic in the West, drug taking becomes an escape mechanism.
It is unfortunate that there is a long established tendency of human institutions to eschew unpopular truths or avenues of research. This is a phenomenon easily noticed by looking at the treatment Galileo experienced at the hands of the Inquisition and Catholic Church.
It should be noted that due to the enormous growth of government, which takes unprecedented amounts of wealth via taxation and inflation, and which now is intimately involved in so much via legislation and regulation, that the same tendencies exist, if not more so. The Catholic Church, and governments of the past, rarely could claim more than four or five percent of national outputs, which severely hampered their reach and control. Governments, even in the so called free nations, typically now control over 40% of the national economies. Given the growth of economy, this puts unprecedented levels of power and funding at the hands of government, and it allows unprecedented control and intrusion.
Government is force, and government is politics, so what government is involved in is the product of force, and determined by politics over truth.
So many research grants, university budgets, student tuition fees, etc. as the direct result of government, it is unsurprising that research should be biased in favor of what is politically palatable, and contrary views be spiked through pressure and funding withdrawal.
Many controversial ideas have sound premises, but with so much wealth diverted toward government, and with the entire atmosphere of research and science tainted by government approval issues, huge walls against progress are the result.
It is a truism that change and progress are often pushed from outside of institutions, because those inside institutions are typically vested in defending the status quo. With government manning the walls, it is sometimes harder than ever to investigate new ideas.
It also makes you wonder. Looking at the explosion of research and invention that occured from about 1850-1910, the inertia it created that carried it through the massive growth in government that started as a result of WW1 (and increased as time went on), would many of those advances in science, technology, and industry have occured if government taxed and regulated so much, and was the dispenser of funds and approval of so much research? I don't think so.
We are currently reaping numerous bitter harvests, and the failed drug policies are just some of them, from letting government control so much of the national treasure, and letting government regulate, fund, and frame the debates and the sciences.
We need more researchers like this Dr. Alexander, and we need an environment that accepts and explores controversial ideas without regard to what the government considers acceptable. Such an environment is unlikely to ever be realized in the Western "Democracies" until the scale and scope of government is seriously reduced. Unfortunately for science and progress, at least in the West, the tendency is toward greater growth of government, control of the economy, and removal of vast areas of private economic and social life into the realm of government involvement.
In what might seem a supreme irony, drug taking seems worst the greater the involvement of government. It is the biggest problem in goverment created or run institutions, from public schools to prisons, to welfare slums to armies in losing wars. As society surrenders more of its wealth, power, and authority to government, traditional and voluntary social organizations wither (like churches), society becomes spiritually adrift, and the impetus for recreational and addictive drug taking increases. It may or may not be causal, but there does seem to be a correlation in the social phenomena. January 17, 2008 08:28 EST
jim beck: I find the study rather superfluous(sp?).I don't think you have to be a brain surgeon to realize that when you live in a less then ideal environment you may resort to whatever it takes to cope.If we as a society have to resort to animal studies to observe what happens to organisms under stressful living conditions apparently we're not paying much attention to whats going on in our poor depressed communities.Maybe we should be more attentive to our own species.Obviously there are exceptions to this specificaly with those individuals that have not been raised in a depressed and restricted environment yet resort to abusive chemical behavior,however,I would venture to say an individual is more likely to use chemicals in an abusive manner if his living conditions were highly stressful and depressed.Certain genetic traits may predispose individuals to particular behaviors under a given environmental condition as compared to indivduals that are exposed to the same conditions but don't share the same genetic trait.We need to be more in tune with human behavior,and god knows with nearly 6 billion people in this world we don't need to observe a few mice to tell us what might be wrong. January 17, 2008 19:57 EST
martin kay: I fully agree with this article.
Drug addictions should be regarded as bad habit spending or spending on inferior goods. Inferior goods is the term used by economists to describe goods that are bought more by poor people than by rich people. Most "normal" goods are consumed more often as income rises. Inferior goods are consumed less as income rises.
Despite the fact that economists have coined the term "inferior goods", they appear to have done very little research into inferior goods. Look through any textbook on economics and you find that they all have the same standard page about them and, generally, half that page is occupied by a graph so that, in effect, only one paragraph is actually written about inferior goods.
These textbooks, used in university economics courses, are so similar when it comes to inferior goods that universities might want to investigate their writers for plagiarism!!
Notice how the behavior of inferior good consumption mimics that of drug consumption: as the quality of life improved, both types of consumption decreased.
Keep in mind the fact that there are other things besides money and income that determine quality of life. It is those things that create the appearance of drug abuse of being the result of poor mental health. February 06, 2008 23:05 EST
Richard M. Gray, Ph.D.: In the mid 90s, as a US Probation Officer, I was given a drug treatment caseload with little training in the field and no conceptual framework beyond the classic skinner box perspective and a ham-handed law enforcement orientation.
In order to prepare myself for the task, I began to read as much as possible about addiction in the scientific journals. I quickly came across the Rat Park study and the studies by Robins illustrating the influence of context on addicted Viet Nam veterans. Inspired by these studies, and armed with a view of human growth rooted in Jungian and Maslowian concepts, I developed a drug treatment program that focused on changing the internal environment of the clients while virtually ignoring the drugs themselves. Using tools from Neuro-Linguistic Programming to implement the program, we treated more than 300 clients and attained abstinence rates of 30% after one year. All this came at the cost of two hours per week of training to develop access to positive resource states and learning to envision personally relevant future outcomes. There was no medical model, no humiliation and no drug focus.
From personal experience and objective results, I can affirm the continuing validity of the Rat Park perspective.
The following link provides further information on the program. http://www.nlpco.com/articles/AddictionsGray.html
Thank you,
Richard M. Gray, Ph.D.
School of Criminal Justice
Fairleigh Dickinson University
February 08, 2008 20:38 EST
Jesus: I really like taking heroin and ecstasy because im a super serial drug addict because my dad God smells like piss and shit and bear piss and bear shit then he made me take drugs :)
Love Jesus -xo March 20, 2008 03:44 EST