Okay, that's rats, but what about humans? Well, luckily enough, there was something going on at roughly the same time as the Rat Park that allowed us to look at this behaviour in humans: The Vietnam War. During 'nam, America was in the middle of a moral panic as 20% of American troops serving in Vietnam were on heroin. This is pretty understandable given the horrors of their daily lives, but people were worried about what would happen when they came back. Thousands of heroin addicts were potentially about to be released back onto the American streets and people didn't know what to do. However, a detailed study of the returning Vietnam veterans found that 95% of them simply stopped using when they came back to their homes and family. This doesn't follow the narrative of chemical addiction leading Bruce Alexander to wonder whether drug addiction in humans too is not based on your chemistry, but your cage.
