3. Drugs Might Not Actually Cause Addiction
So, what causes drug addiction? Duh, drugs, right? Wrong. There have been various high and low profile experiments that appear to show the deliciously moreish nature of drugs. In the lab, rats that are given two water bottles, one with morphine and one without, will keep coming back to the morphine cocktail until they essentially die of a drug overdose. A monkey who were hooked up to a self-administering heroin machine will regularly inject itself with heroin for no apparent reason. These studies have always caused scientists to conclude that people just have a natural disposition for drug addiction and that we're helpless in the face of their awesome power. However, what many of these studies fail to take into account is the fact that the animals that they are experimenting on are kept in bare steel cages with nothing else to do but take the drugs. They have no stimulation, no mate, nothing else to distract it from its cold, lonely existence other than the magic water that makes them feel good. In a Canadian study, a psychologist called Bruce Alexander decided to probe this a little. He built a "Rat Park" which was essentially a luxury theme park for rats. The rats were provided with plenty of food, toys and friends as well as the two water bottles, one of which was spiked. Before releasing them into Rat Park, the rats were given morphine for 57 days straight, long enough to get at least a little bit hooked. He found that, once the rats were moved into their plush new surroundings, they showed significantly less interest in the morphine. In fact, nothing that the scientists did could produce anything like an addictive behaviour in the rats. Parallels can be irresistibly drawn between the cold, isolated cages of the rats, and the cold isolation that drug users are pushed into in our society.