Thread: Peace talks in a long war

Saw a quote about new book this morning:

The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

The book:

Chasing the Scream | The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

[which is a pretty slick web site selling the book]

I chased down the quote, and it's a short-ish article (by the book's author) on Huff Post:

The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think | Johann Hari

... which I almost didn't link to (because Huff Post can be pretty crappy) but then changed my mind (because the article itself isn't bad).


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Originally Posted by deputyfestus

I was listening to an interview with the author of Chasing the Scream on the radio a few days ago. The whole Billie Holiday portion was very enlightening.

Gotta give me more than that. I only heard about this (and read the quote) this morning. Was this interview local? National? Who did the interview? Is there a podcast or an archive?

The bits I read today (what I had time for) resonated well. Though I'm not foolish enough to think I have all the answers (or, really, any answers at all) for a long time I've felt like our nation-wide sensibility about these issues has been way off base - like almost all of us are missing some important aspect of what's going on.


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Originally Posted by deputyfestus

KPFT 90.1 Houston just check the archives.

Thanks. Looked on their site. Didn't find anything that looked like an archive or a library.

They seem like a small local operation, so maybe they don't/can't do that stuff. Noticed they're asking for volunteers to (from what I can tell) assist in their efforts to rip all their CDs to a digital library.

And good luck to 'em. I love that these things exist and thrive.


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