Rat Park - Bruce K. Alexander's 1970's study of drug addiction

[Pondlife]

The American psychologist Bruce K. Alexander conducted a study into drug addiction during the 1970s at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. The study used rats and morphine in an environment called "Rat Park". Here is a quote from a wikipedia article:

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

To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, a 200-square-foot (18.6 sq. m) housing colony, 200 times the square footage of a standard laboratory cage. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, an abundance of food, balls and wheels for play, and private places for mating and giving birth. The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis. Rats who had been forced to consume morphine hydrochloride for 57 consecutive days were brought to Rat Park and given a choice between plain tap water and water laced with morphine. For the most part, they chose the plain water. "Nothing that we tried," Alexander wrote, "... produced anything that looked like addiction in rats that were housed in a reasonably normal environment."

The two major biology journals, Science and Nature, rejected Alexander's paper, which appeared instead in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, a respectable but much smaller journal, and the paper's publication attracted no response. Because of the lukewarm reception, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.

So, when they took the rats out of their cramped and boring metal cages and put them in a more interesting environment with more space and privacy, the rats lost interest in morphine. That's a very interesting finding, and I'm surprised that the paper was not well received.

Perhaps the establishment (government, drug companies Etc.) didn't want to hear the message. That's a shame, because the funding was withdrawn, and few people have heard of the research today.