Lab habits: Do depressed lab rats dictate international drug policy?

[ernestrome]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/jun/02/farout

An old article, but quite interesting.

[top]Lab habits

Do depressed lab rats dictate international drug policy?

• Mark Pilkington
• The Guardian
• Thursday June 2 2005

The predominant model of drug addiction views it as a disease: humans and animals will use heroin or cocaine for as long as they are available. When the drugs run out, they will seek a fresh supply; the drugs, not the users, are in control.
These conclusions, repeated frequently by politicians and the media, are based on experiments carried out almost exclusively on animals, usually rats and monkeys, housed in metal cages and experiencing a particularly poor quality of life. What would happen, wondered psychologist Dr Bruce Alexander, then of British Columbia's Simon Fraser University, if these animals were instead provided with a comfortable, stimulating environment?
In 1981, Alexander built a 200sq ft home for lab rats. Rat Park, as it became known, was kept clean and temperate, while the rats were supplied with plenty of food and toys, along with places to dig, rest and mate. Alexander even painted the walls with a soothing natural backdrop of lakes and trees. He then installed two drips, one containing a morphine solution, the other plain water. This was rat heaven: but would happy rats develop morphine habits?
Try as he might, Alexander could not make junkies out of his rats. Even after being force-fed morphine for two months, when given the option, they chose plain water, despite experiencing mild withdrawal symptoms. He laced the morphine with sugar, but still they ignored it. Only when he added Naloxone, an opiate inhibitor, to the sugared morphine water, did they drink it.
Alexander simultaneously monitored rats kept in "normal" lab conditions: they consistently chose the morphine drip over plain water, sometimes consuming 16-20 times more than the Rat Parkers.
Alexander's findings - that deprived rats seek solace in opiates, while contented rats avoid them - dramatically contradict our currently held beliefs about addiction. So, how might society benefit if his results were applied to human addicts? Nobody seemed to care.
Rejected by Science and Nature, Alexander's paper was published in the obscure Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior, where it was summarily ignored.
Two decades later, Rat Park sits empty; addiction remains a disease and the war on drugs continues.

And the abstract of the article referred to therein.

Alexander BK, Beyerstein BL, Hadaway PF, Coambs RB. Effect of early and later colony housing on oral ingestion of morphine in rats. Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behaviour. 1981 Oct;15(4):571-6.

Male and female rats were raised from weaning either in isolation or in a large colony. At 65 days of age, half the rats in each environment were moved to the other. At 80 days, the animals were given continuous access to water and to a sequence of 7 solutions: 3 sweet or bitter-sweet control solutions and 4 different concentrations of morphine hydrochloride (MHCl) in 10% sucrose solution. Rats housed in the colony at the time of testing drank less MHCl solution than isolated rats, but no less of the control solutions. Colony-dwelling rats previously housed in isolation tended to drink more MHCl solution than those housed in the colony since weaning, but this effect reached statistical significance only at the lowest concentration of MHCl. These data were related to the hypothesis that colony rats avoid morphine because it interferes with complex, species-specific behavior.

Reputation Comments on this post:

	good article
	Wonderful find, thanks for sharing it :)

[Paracelsus]

The results of the Rat Park experiment supported the idea that persons that live a boring, isolated life are more likely to get addicted to drugs than socially healthy individuals. This contradicted the generally accepted story of drugs being so powerful and evil that they can enslave anyone in addiction. No wonder this research was and is ignored, while studies which are hardly scientific are fed to the public by mainstream media.

[Heretic.Ape.]

This is one of the most interesting articles I've seen in a while. I'll take a look to see if I can get us a copy of that study.

[D-termine]

Just an interesting article I ran across on another forum, thought I might share

Rat Park was a study into drug addiction conducted in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Alexander's hypothesis was that drugs do not cause addiction, 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. [1] 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." [2]

To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park, a 200-square-foot (18.6 m²) 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. [3] 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." [1]

The two major science 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. [4] Because of the lukewarm reception, Simon Fraser University withdrew Rat Park's funding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

[Paracelsus]

This study, which is most definitely not news, has been discussed before. Use the search engine to find the thread(s).