Do depressed lab rats dictate international drug policy?

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Do depressed lab rats dictate international drug policy?

Mark Pilkington
Thursday June 2, 2005
The Guardian

The predominant model of drug addiction views it as a disease: humans and animals will use heroin or cocaine for as long as they are available. When the drugs run out, they will seek a fresh supply; the drugs, not the users, are in control.

These conclusions, repeated frequently by politicians and the media, are based on experiments carried out almost exclusively on animals, usually rats and monkeys, housed in metal cages and experiencing a particularly poor quality of life. What would happen, wondered psychologist Dr Bruce Alexander, then of British Columbia's Simon Fraser University, if these animals were instead provided with a comfortable, stimulating environment?

In 1981, Alexander built a 200sq ft home for lab rats. Rat Park, as it became known, was kept clean and temperate, while the rats were supplied with plenty of food and toys, along with places to dig, rest and mate. Alexander even painted the walls with a soothing natural backdrop of lakes and trees. He then installed two drips, one containing a morphine solution, the other plain water. This was rat heaven: but would happy rats develop morphine habits?

Try as he might, Alexander could not make junkies out of his rats. Even after being force-fed morphine for two months, when given the option, they chose plain water, despite experiencing mild withdrawal symptoms. He laced the morphine with sugar, but still they ignored it. Only when he added Naloxone, an opiate inhibitor, to the sugared morphine water, did they drink it.

Alexander simultaneously monitored rats kept in "normal" lab conditions: they consistently chose the morphine drip over plain water, sometimes consuming 16-20 times more than the Rat Parkers.

Alexander's findings - that deprived rats seek solace in opiates, while contented rats avoid them - dramatically contradict our currently held beliefs about addiction. So, how might society benefit if his results were applied to human addicts? Nobody seemed to care.

Rejected by Science and Nature, Alexander's paper was published in the obscure Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, where it was summarily ignored.

Two decades later, Rat Park sits empty; addiction remains a disease and the war on drugs continues.
 
WOW! Thats god-damn amazing, i'm surprised more people are not interested? Is there something we don't know about the setup ?
 
Yes, I really want to know if we're missing some confounding variable or something, because it really sounds to me like a lot of governments have really put their foot in it....

:p :X
 
Good article!
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Oops, forgot to post the link. Sorry about that. Thanks %)

I really want to know if we're missing some confounding variable or something
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Set and setting. It may just be three words, but its a very complex factor. It amazes me that so many so called 'scientists' think they can study a drugs effect on human behaviour without taking this extremely complex factor into account. We've been saying "set and setting" with regards to psychedelic drugs for over 40 years now yet people still think as if the effects of psychedelic drugs are entirely uncontrollable and unpredictable factors. With regards to addiction, set and setting work differently, but they still play a huge role in one's tendency to habitualy repeat use of a drug, IMHO.

Lately I've been thinking of addiction, and mental illness in general, as sort of a social disease. IOW we have ills in our society: socioeconomic disparity, violence and warfare, authoritiarinism, repression, racism, sexism, shallow commercialism, mass imprisonment, etc. etc. that causes many members of society to feel as if they are locked in a cage even though they may not be so physically. And since people's cultural upbringings don't prepare them to deal with this a number of people in society react to this by becoming addicted or mentally ill or whatever.

Of course, while that may be a good approach for determining social policy, I want to emphasise it still doesn't do any good for you as an individual to blame your problems on society. For the individual, addiction is still a choice. Thats not to say its an easy choice, or that its not a very personal choice, or that its always the right or wrong choice. You still may need the support of others to get your self to make the best choice for you self, or alternatively you may need to ignore the opinions of some others to make the best choice for you self. But its still your choice, for which you are responsible, and for which you will recieve the benefits and consequences, IMHO.
 
Along a related line, there was an experiment a few years ago that found that rats housed in isolation (with no other rats to interact with) found MDMA ('ecstasy') addictive, while rats housed in groups did not.

Addiction is the result of the interaction between a drug and the user's personality/circumstances. If anything, it would be more accurate to say that some PEOPLE are addictive.
 
What would happen, wondered psychologist Dr Bruce Alexander, then of British Columbia's Simon Fraser University, if these animals were instead provided with a comfortable, stimulating environment?
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is this why there seems to be more drug use in poor areas?
 
Isn't this the enriched enviroment (is that the term?) that's being used more today?
 
Here's the citation to his published research if anyone has journal access.

Alexander BK, Beyerstein BL, Hadaway PF, Coambs RB. Effect of early and later colony housing on oral ingestion of morphine in rats. Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behaviour. 1981 Oct;15(4):571-6.

Male and female rats were raised from weaning either in isolation or in a large colony. At 65 days of age, half the rats in each environment were moved to the other. At 80 days, the animals were given continuous access to water and to a sequence of 7 solutions: 3 sweet or bitter-sweet control solutions and 4 different concentrations of morphine hydrochloride (MHCl) in 10% sucrose solution. Rats housed in the colony at the time of testing drank less MHCl solution than isolated rats, but no less of the control solutions. Colony-dwelling rats previously housed in isolation tended to drink more MHCl solution than those housed in the colony since weaning, but this effect reached statistical significance only at the lowest concentration of MHCl. These data were related to the hypothesis that colony rats avoid morphine because it interferes with complex, species-specific behavior.
 
Thanks for bumping it, and thanks johannes for providing a current link.


I think the study proves what we already know; drug use is caused by many things, and one of those things is certainly depression brought on by bleak situations.

That isn't to say that everyone who is going through a rough time will use drugs, and it certainly doesn't say that people who have it all won't use drugs.

It's just more complicated than this, at least with humans.
 
That kind of goes along with when unemployment and poverty go up so does drug use.
 
GAH DONT YOU PEOPLE GET IT ??

to most people working 5 days a week, paying rent, bills, interest etc are "lab conditions"

People then like the rats put drugs above everything else and develop life threatening addictions

People who are free from the daily grind mostly dont do drugs. I havent worked for months and havent felt the need to get fucked up either.

You could say im in rat park %)
 
qwe said:
is this why there seems to be more drug use in poor areas?
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very glad someone bumped this thread, great read.

qwe, that's actually what my fiance and I were just discussing after reading just the article a few minutes ago, damn that's an interesting read!!
 
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