Everything You Think You Know About Addiction and the War on Drugs Is Wrong

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/28672-everything-you-think-you-know-about-addiction-and-the-war-on-drugs-is-wrong

So Bruce built Rat Park. Rat Park was heaven for rats. Anything a rat could want, it got in Rat Park. It had lovely food, colored walls, tunnels to scamper down, other rats to have sex with. And they had access to both water bottles — the drug water and the normal water.

What's fascinating is that in Rat Park, they didn't like the drug water. They hardly ever used it. They only used it in low doses, none of them ever overdose and none used it in a way that looked compulsive or addictive.

What Bruce says is that this shows us that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory of addiction is that it's a moral failing and hedonist. The left-wing theory is that you get taken over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says, It's not your morality, it's not your brain — it's your cage. Addiction is an adaptation to your environment. Human beings need to connect, and when we can't connect with each other, because we're traumatized or beaten down or cut off, we will connect with something that will give us some sense of relief or pleasure. If you can't bond with people, you will obsessively bond with something that gives you some sense of purpose.

Mic: What are the implications of the Rat Park experiment for addiction and the war on drugs?

JH: The war on drugs is built on the idea that the chemicals are the problem. Once you realize that disconnection and isolation are the drivers of addiction, you suddenly realize that what we do actually makes addiction worse. We take addicts who are addicted because they're isolated and suffering, isolate them in prison cells and make it impossible for them to get jobs when they leave, and inflict more pain and suffering on them. As the doctor from Vancouver said to me, if you wanted to create a system that would make addiction worse, you would create the system that we have.

I went in Arizona to a prison called Tent City, where I went out with women who were forced to go out on a chain gang wearing t-shirts saying "I was a drug addict." When I went to the isolation unit where they're kept, they're literally put in a cell that that makes you think, "This the closest you could get to a human reenactment of the rat cage that guaranteed addiction — the one in the first set of experiments."

[joshcryer]

1. Can always get behind a Rat Park post.

[ND-Dem]

2. k&r

[silverweb]

3. K&R

[bemildred]

4. Finally somebody decides to question the magic drug bullshit. nt

[enough]

5. Hari's book, "Chasing the Scream" is fascinating, both on the past and present

horrors of the Drug War, and on the current attempts to take a different approach.

[riderinthestorm]

6. Big K&R! nt

[nashville_brook]

7. k and r