Rat Paradise - Where Drug Addiction Is No Longer An Issue For Rats Or Humans Who Are Not In Cages

Rat Park - It's not the drug, it's the box [cage] ...
http://suboxforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=1444
 
In the late 1970's, Bruce Alexander conducted the Rat Park experiments in an attempt to better understand the effects of environment on addiction. Instead of keeping his junky (adicted) rats alone in a wire cage with nothing but heroin to do, he built them a rat paradise.

The rats in Rat Park showed some curious behavior: when presented with an unlimited supply of morphine, they chose plain fresh water instead. He even added sugar to the morphine water to make it more appealing, and still the rats just said No.

Quote:
A Skinner box is a cage equipped to condition an animal’s behaviour through reward or punishment. In a typical drug test, a surgically implanted catheter is hooked up to a drug supply that the animal self-administers by pressing a lever. Hundreds of trials showed that lab animals readily became slaves to such drugs as heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines. “They were said to prove that these kinds of dope are irresistible, and that’s it, that’s the end of the addiction story right there,” Alexander says. After one particularly fruitless seminar in 1976, he decided to run his own tests.

The problem with the Skinner box experiments, Alexander and his co-researchers suspected, was the box itself. To test that hypothesis, Alexander built an Eden for rats. Rat Park was a plywood enclosure the size of 200 standard cages. There were cedar shavings, boxes, tin cans for hiding and nesting, poles for climbing, and plenty of food. Most important, because rats live in colonies, Rat Park housed sixteen to twenty animals of both sexes.

Rats in Rat Park and control animals in standard laboratory cages had access to two water bottles, one filled with plain water and the other with morphine-laced water. The denizens of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred plain water to morphine (the test produced statistical confidence levels of over 99.9 percent). Even when Alexander tried to seduce his rats by sweetening the morphine, the ones in Rat Park drank far less than the ones in cages. Only when he added naloxone, which eliminates morphine’s narcotic effects, did the rats in Rat Park start drinking from the water-sugar-morphine bottle. They wanted the sweet water, but not if it made them high.

The addicted rats in Rat Park even kicked their habits voluntarily when given the option to do so:

Quote:
In a variation he calls “Kicking the Habit,” Alexander gave rats in both environments nothing but morphine-laced water for fifty-seven days, until they were physically dependent on the drug. But as soon as they had a choice between plain water and morphine, the animals in Rat Park switched to plain water more often than the caged rats did, voluntarily putting themselves through the discomfort of withdrawal to do so.

Maybe this offers an explanation as to why some people can use addictive drugs without becoming addictive. It might also offer some ideas as to why addiction treatment so often fails. Maybe we're focused on the wrong things. Maybe we need to fix the issues that seem to so often foster addiction [Both physical and mental cages.]: poverty, loneliness, lack of community, lack of spirituality.

Well worth reading: A more in depth chapter from the book - Opening Skinner's Box by Lauren Slater is here.

More articles on Rat Paradise here:
http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/02/08/the-rat-park/
http://the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2008/02/rat-park-addiction-and-environmental.html
http://homelessnation.org/en/node/6949

You can read more about the Rat Park experiments here.

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