* * * * *
                                        
                         The likely cause of addiction
                                        
> If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have
> looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not
> difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all
> explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on
> the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong
> chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our
> bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would
> be addicted. That's what addiction means.
> 
> …
> 
> 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. 
> 

Via FaceGoogleMyBookPlusSpace, “The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been
Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think | Johann Hari [1]”

Interesting, and it fits with animals in the wild getting stoned to escape
their hellish lives [2] I posted about last month.

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2015/02/11.1

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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