10 DAYS. DARNKESS.
We owe to American psychologist, Dr Bruce Alexander, the understanding that addiction is about far more than any drug. That a person, or animal in his studies, is an active ingredient in their interaction with a drug. To stand a chance beating the opioid and other drug epidemics we have, we will be far better equipped if we follow his lead.
Alexander’s experiments, in the 1970s, have come to be called the “Rat Park.1 Researchers had already proved that when rats were placed in a cage, all alone, with no other community of rats, and offered two water bottles-one filled with water and the other with heroin or cocaine-the rats would repetitively drink from the drug-laced bottles until they all overdosed and died. Like pigeons pressing a pleasure lever, they were relentless, until their bodies and brains were overcome, and they died.
But Alexander wondered: is this about the drug or might it be related to the setting they were in? To test his hypothesis, he put rats in “rat parks,” where they were among others and free to roam and play, to socialize and to have sex. And they were given the same access to the same two types of drug laced bottles. When inhabiting a “rat park,” they remarkably preferred the plain water. Even when they did imbibe from the drug-filled bottle, they did so intermittently, not obsessively, and never overdosed. A social community beat the power of drugs.
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-teach-us-about-addiction
https://archive.is/wip/1uzRQ
ask questions, reject the answers, have a nice day
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