He cited the Rat Park experiment as well as a study published in 1975 which showed that rates of heroin addiction were 20 times higher for Vietnam soldiers while they were stationed in the war zone than before they shipped out. He devoted a chapter to establishing how environment can be a significant contributing factor in developing an addiction. In the book, Maté argued that the War on Drugs has been a failure and argues for more comprehensive, compassionate treatment of people struggling with addiction. In 2008, Gabor Maté, a Canadian doctor, addiction expert, and strong critic of the War on Drugs, published In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, which was was a #1 best-seller in Canada and went on to be a New York Times bestseller as well. The experiment’s finding that environment is the determining factor in the development of addiction was held up as the “ vital missing evidence” by the psychologist and BBC columnist Tom Stafford, and many other writers, journalists, and popular psychologists picked up the line. And in the late aughts, they found fodder in the Rat Park experiment. to more lenient policies in Europe, and found that it did not correlate with lower usage rates in fact, the “combined hardcore user rate for hard drugs” was “approximately 4 times higher in the US than in Europe,” the report concluded.Īs it became more apparent that the War on Drugs was a costly failure, both in terms of dollars and damage to people and communities, its critics became more vocal.
In 2008, The Brookings Institute compared the “punishment” model used in the U.S. Though many had long doubted the effectiveness of increased criminalization of drugs and drug use, it took 30 years of longitudinal studies to get hard data to support that notion. Alexander called this the “Myth of the Demon Drug.”
This was an oversimplified, damaging view that fundamentally misunderstood addiction and helped undermine more effective policy ideas like decriminalization and harm reduction. The prevailing rhetoric asserted that recreational drugs were inherently addictive and using them would “ hijack” the brain, turning it from a “normal” brain into an addicted one. But instead of pushing the popular understanding forward, it merely replaced that misconception with a new one: that environment is the most important factor. The Rat Park study undermined one popular misconception about addiction, that chemistry of drugs is the single most important factor in addiction. The Rat Park study was flawed in its design and its findings, however, and it was ignored for almost three decades - until a group of experts rediscovered and started promoting it around 2008. “Addiction isn’t you - it’s the cage you live in,” Alexander concluded. The rats in both cages became physically dependent on the morphine, but the Rat Park rats consumed less morphine than the group in the boring cage. The so-called “Rat Park” experiment was intended to debunk some of the flawed understanding around addiction at the time, specifically the notion that the drug itself was the most important factor in whether someone became addicted. In 1979, Bruce Alexander, a researcher at Simon Fraser University, separated rats into two cages, a stimulating one and an isolated one, and gave them morphine in order to measure the effect of environment on addiction rates.
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