Rat Park: Addiction is a situation, not a disease
Thousands of studies have been done claiming that addiction is a disease, mostly by putting rats in a cage with some drugs and noting that they’ll repeatedly take the drugs, even if it means starving to death.
Bruce Alexander was skeptical about these results. He noticed that the rats in the experiments were stuffed alone in a boring cage with little else to do. “If I was strapped down alone in a cage,” he thought, “I’d probably want to get high too.”
So he built a rat park — a large, intricate, brightly-painted and heavily-padded structure to make the rats actually happy. He put half the rats in the normal cages and half in the park and gave both equal access to drugs.
The rats in the cage got addicted, while the rats in the park stayed away.
Then, even more strikingly, he took rats who’d had 57 days to get addicted to the drugs and took half of them out of the cages and put them in the park. The rats, even though they’d been addicted in the cage, suddenly stayed away from the drugs. They even voluntarily detoxed — trembling and shaking, but still staying off the drugs.
The top-shelf journals like Science and Nature rejected the study. It did end up getting published in a peer reviewed journal (Pharamacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, impact factor 1.5), but received little public attention. His university pulled the funding for the project.
Ajju Apr 24
Fascinating. Have no further studies been conducted on this? /Goes off to investigate
Henry Steinberger, Ph.D. (SMART Recovery) Dec 11
Thank you for giving this study some coverage. I first heard of it in a book by Stanton Peele and more recently in The Walrus (Mon. Dec. 3, 2007) but as noted, never in the most popular science journals nor in the public media where it would get notice (e.g. The NY Times Sunday Magazine). We on the Board of Directors of SMART Recovery have been battling out whether the organization should take a firm stand against the “disease model” or to gain greater acceptance by muzzling our opinions. Our program is science-based and secular, and we have always supported a bio-psycho-social model (but most of our volunteer facilitators and attendees know that we do not insist on any sort of “disease” and that is what we usually say when introducing our meetings). I hope that others will be attracted to SMART Recovery and that the Rat Park study will get the attention it deserves. Our program deals mainly with Motivation, Coping with Urges, Managing Beliefs and Getting a life with a balance of short and long term Satisfactions. I think that last point is very much in keeping with Rat Park. A life with a mix of SATISFACTIONS is the best path away from addictions (rather than a magic pill or faith in a deity who will take away the so-called “character defects” found in the moral model masquarading as a medical model).
Anthony Manzo Feb 16
This study is disruptive and pivotal in every way. Has been any replication? LiteracyMan