Happy rats don't do drugs

It doesn't take an expert in psychology to know that drugs (like Oreos) are addictive. Nearly a century of research confirms it, mostly with rats. Why rats? Sure, they're small, cheap, docile, breed faster than rabbits, and are surprisingly cute. More importantly, rat brains and human brains have a lot in common, especially when it comes to chemical reactions and social behavior.

Wait, social behavior? Yup. Just like humans, rats need contact. Connections. Touch. The security of society. Connect this to drugs, and the results shouldn't have been as surprising as they were.

Fifty years ago, prevailing scientific opinion was that drugs such as morphine and cocaine were highly addictive. This was based on several experiments with rats who, given the availability of a high, would keep going back until it literally killed them. Conclusion? Once begun, the habit was almost impossible to kick willingly, at least without major intervention; as helpless as trying to stop at just one Oreo (the cookie proved just as addictive as cocaine in a 2013 experiment at Connecticut College).

But wait, said Canadian psychology professor Bruce Alexander in the 1970s and '80s; something isn't right here. Those rats in the "Skinner box experiments" were already depressed; prisoners kept in hard, small cages alone with nothing else to do, why wouldn't they prefer mental escape to reality? Let's see what happy rats do. So Alexander made Rat Park - a residential community with everything rats love: Plenty of company (male and female; rats are highly sexual), tunnels to hide and explore, wood chips to burrow and toss, games to play and room to roam. Rat heaven.

Rat Park residents were then given the same choice as were lone rats in old-style, solid-walled cages: water laced with cocaine, and plain water. They all tried both containers once. But here's the interesting part: Rat Park residents didn't go back to the cocaine water, instead consistently choosing the plain water. The other stuff apparently interfered with their happy lives. They ran the experiment several times, and others replicated it.

So the question becomes, what's the fix for an addict? Remove the drug and address the physical aspects, certainly, but this and other research suggest more is called for from fellow man. Improve the life (which can never be done alone), the quality of human-to-human connections, and thus reduce the drive to escape it. That doesn't make drugs any less addictive with time, but it sure makes them less attractive from the start.

Why was this hard to swallow? It was; the Rat Park results made a ripple but not much of a splash in the field 40 years ago. Perhaps partly because "it takes a village" is a complex answer, not easy or quick.

So Rat Park closed. Professor Alexander continues to work with addicts in Vancouver, B.C., and write about addiction. A brand new book on addiction and government policy, "Chasing the Scream" by reporter Johann Hari, has brought the Rat Park experiments briefly back to the forefront, renewing the conversation connecting the quality and extent of social interactions to addictive behavior.

Because duplicating the Rat Park experiment isn't possible with humans (the labs become drug dealer central), Professor Alexander used history, comparing colonialization in Western Canada - another instance of "caging," of isolation, this time of one society by another. He observed that the pre-colonialization societies of both the indigenous peoples (called "Indians" by the English colonists) and the colonizers had similar social problems: warfare, disease, some alcoholism, slavery, personal betrayals, etc. After colonization, the English took children from families and put them in English schools to be assimilated to the dominant culture. The Indian culture was suppressed - native language use and customs discouraged or forbidden. Indians forcefully relocated to smaller, more cramped, less appealing areas. Prosperity plummeted. Pretty soon, alcoholism was rampant among the indigenous, culturally repressed population. Addiction, historically rare in the old society, had become the norm. Global history is replete with similar examples.

The parallel with Rat Park? Isolation. Professor Alexander writes, in his article Addiction, the view from Rat Park:

"In both cases there is little drug consumption in the natural environment and a lot when the people or animals are placed in an environment that produces social and cultural isolation. In the case of rats, social and cultural isolation is produced by confining the rats in individual cages. In the case of native people, the social and cultural isolation is produced by destroying the foundations of their cultural life... In both cases, the colonizers or the experimenters who provide the drug explain the drug consumption in the isolated environment by saying that the drug is irresistible, (b)ut in both cases, the drug only becomes irresistible when the opportunity for normal social existence is destroyed."

Food for societal thought.

Speaking of food, the Oreo experiment showed a similar reaction in the brain between Oreos and cocaine. Makes you rethink the term, "sugar high." Oh, and like humans, rats prefer the creamy center to the chocolate cookie.

Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who prefers the chocolate cookie. Contact her at Sholeh@cdapress.com.