Rat Park revisited

[dopamimetic]

Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, and that the apparent addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable to their living conditions, and not to any addictive property of the drug itself.[1] He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior experiments in which laboratory rats were kept isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a self-injection apparatus, show only that "severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can.

This is so true.

A recent documentary about cane toads in Australia made me think again about this. They showed a dog that willingly searched for such a toad and licked a bit on it - just enough to get high. Repeatedly. For years. He apparently enjoyed the psychedelia - something science (afaik) says animals don't.

It's not that the rats are that different from us. No one having to live in a small lab cage with some wires stuck into his body could actually enjoy a psychedelic trip, really.
Maybe this is a simple example. But hell, why are they still doing the same thing, more than 30 years later - and what could this not all implicate for the research on psych meds...!?

 

[Burnt Offerings]

I largely agree that the cause of most problematic drug use is environmental in nature. I'm not sure how that problem can be solved for most addicts, though. It's easy to give rats an "enriched environment" but how do you do that for people? How do you give someone a family who no longer has one, for example? How do you instill purpose and meaning in an individual's life? And then there's the existential pain of simply being human which I'm pretty sure rats never experience.

 

[serotonin2A]

This is so true.

A recent documentary about cane toads in Australia made me think again about this. They showed a dog that willingly searched for such a toad and licked a bit on it - just enough to get high. Repeatedly. For years. He apparently enjoyed the psychedelia - something science (afaik) says animals don't.

It's not that the rats are that different from us. No one having to live in a small lab cage with some wires stuck into his body could actually enjoy a psychedelic trip, really.
Maybe this is a simple example. But hell, why are they still doing the same thing, more than 30 years later - and what could this not all implicate for the research on psych meds...!?

There isn't any way to know the the dog was experiencing psychedelic effects. The tryptamines in the venom are, at best, only weakly active by oral administration. The venom contains cardiac glycosides such as bufotoxins, which are responsible for the toxic effects when the venom is ingested.

When people use the venom as a hallucinogen, they smoke it. People who have eaten the venom get very sick but don't hallucinate. Is there any reason a dog would respond differently?