- 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.
It turns out what we think we know,
it might just be wrong.
This is Bruce Alexander.
- I'm a psychologist with Simon Fraser University
- [Man] 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 of the time described
as a growing epidemic.
- [Bruce] 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.
When 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.
- [Man] Much of that research used animal studies.
Particularly laboratory rats.
Rats would be placed in really
small cages called "skinner boxes".
- [Bruce] 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 rat's pressed the little lever on the wall,
they would get a little surge
of heroin in their bloodstream.
- [Man] Press the pedal, get a shot of heroin.
Press the pedal, get another shot.
- [Bruce] And in some cases,
they just kept pumping heroin into themselves
to the point where they forgot to eat and would die.
- [Man] 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.
- [Bruce] These experiments seem to show
that any creature, including even the lowly rat,
if given access to heroin, would simply take
lots and lots of it.
- [Man] But Bruce had another idea.
- [Bruce] What these experiments really show
is that rats, who are in solitary confinement,
will take lots of heroin.
- [Man] 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, doing rat stuff.
- [Bruce] To put a rat in a skinner box,
is to make this very, very social creature
live a life of solitary confinement.
- [Man] 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.
- [Man] 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--
- [Bruce] You could say that they acted more or less
like human recreational users of morphine.
- [Man] Bruce and his colleagues even tried
an experiment where the rats in cages were given
nothing but morphine laced with water to drink
for 57 days straight.
- In other words, we made sure they
were good and addicted, in terms of the
conventional expectation, everyone of those
rats should have been addicted for
the rest of its life.
- [Man] But when they were placed in Rat Park,
those same addicted rats generally chose
to drink the plain water, and voluntarily
went through withdrawal.
- [Bruce] People were shocked that the rats
in Rat Park had so little interest in morphine.
- [Man] The Rat Park studies suggested a much more
complex picture of addiction than the many
people had suspected.
Addiction wasn't simply a story of chemicals
rewiring our brains, or high-jacking
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 to the halfway houses,
instead of intergrating 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.
- [Man] 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 addictions
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.