In his third book, The Globalization of Addiction: a study in poverty
of the spirit, Bruce Alexander proposes a radical rethink of addiction.
Bruce Alexander is best known - though deserves to be much better
known - for the 'Rat Park' experiments he conducted in 1981. As an
addiction psychologist, much of the data with which he worked was
drawn from laboratory trials with rats and monkeys: the
'addictiveness' of drugs such as opiates and cocaine was established
by observing how frequently caged animals would push levers to obtain
doses. But Alexander's observations of addicts at the clinic where he
worked in Vancouver suggested powerfully to him that the root cause
of addiction was not so much the pharmacology of these particular
drugs as the environmental stressors with which his addicts were
trying to cope.
To test his hunch he designed Rat Park, an alternative laboratory
environment constructed around the need of the subjects rather than
the experimenters. A colony of rats, who are naturally gregarious,
were allowed to roam together in a large vivarium enriched with
wheels, balls and other playthings, on a deep bed of aromatic cedar
shavings and with plenty of space for breeding and private
interactions. Pleasant woodland vistas were even painted on the
surrounding walls. In this situation, the rats' responses to drugs
such as opiates were transformed. They no longer showed interest in
pressing levers for rewards of morphine: even if forcibly addicted,
they would suffer withdrawals rather than maintaining their
dependence. Even a sugar solution could not tempt them to the
morphine water (though they would choose this if naloxone was added
to block the opiate effects). It seemed that the standard experiments
were measuring not the addictiveness of opiates but the cruelty of
the stresses inflicted on lab rats caged in solitary confinement,
shaved, catheterised and with probes inserted into their median
forebrain bundles.
<http://nthposition.com/theglobalisationof.php>Review
<http://www.amazon.com/Globalisation-Addiction-Bruce-Alexander/dp/0199230129>Order
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