Rat Park was a study conducted in the 1970s by Bruce Alexander that challenged the dominant view that drugs cause addiction. In Rat Park, which was a more natural and enriched environment compared to standard lab cages, rats had much less appetite for morphine. When rats that had been forced to consume morphine were given a choice in Rat Park, they mostly chose plain water over morphine water. This supported Alexander's hypothesis that addiction is driven more by environmental factors like isolation rather than inherent properties of drugs. However, the Rat Park study was initially rejected by major journals and its funding withdrawn.

2. Rat Park was a study into drug addiction
conducted in the late 1970s (published in 1980)
by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Alexander and
his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in
British Columbia, Canada.
Rat Park

3. Alexander’s hypothesis was that drugs do not
cause addiction, and that the apparent
addiction to opiate drugs commonly observed
in laboratory rats exposed to it is attributable
to their living conditions, and not to any
addictive property of the drug itself.
Rat Park

5. He told the Canadian Senate in 2001 that prior
experiments in which laboratory rats were kept
isolated in cramped metal cages, tethered to a
self-injection apparatus, show only that
“severely distressed animals, like severely
distressed people, will relieve their distress
pharmacologically if they can.”
Rat Park

7. To test his hypothesis, Alexander built Rat Park,
an 8.8 m2 (95 sq ft) housing colony, 200 times
the floor area 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 enough space for mating
and raising litters.
Rat Park

8. The box was fitted out to serve as a happy home
and playground for groups of rats. My colleagues
and I found that rats that lived together in this
approximation of a natural environment had
much less appetite for morphine than rats housed
in solitary confinement in the tiny metal cages
that were standard in those days.
Bruce’s site on rat park

10. 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.
Rat Park

11. 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.” Control groups of rats isolated in
small cages consumed much more morphine in
this and several subsequent experiments.
Rat Park

12. The only people who acted surprised at the time –
and a bit offended – were those addiction
researchers who believed that the great appetite
for morphine, heroin, and cocaine that earlier
experiments had demonstrated in rats housed in
the tiny solitary confinement cages proved that
these drugs were irresistible to all mammals,
including human beings.
Bruce’s site on rat park

13. The two major science journals, Science and
Nature, rejected Alexander, Coambs, and
Hadaway’s first paper, which appeared instead
in Psychopharmacology, a respectable but
much smaller journal in 1978. The paper’s
publication initially attracted no response.
Within a few years, Simon Fraser University
withdrew Rat Park’s funding.
Rat Park

14. The Rat Park experiments, ..flatly contradicted
the dominant view of addiction in their day.
They quickly disappeared from view, having
evoked only negative responses in the
mainstream press and journals. Lauren Slater’s
controversial psychology book, Opening
Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments
of the Twentieth Century helped to bring them
back to public attention in 2005. These
experiments are now widely known and cited.
Bruce Alexander

15. deserves an intense investigation/revolution/wake-up call.

16. has been too biased/blinded.. by a sample set
of imposterous/negligentical/ginormously-small proportions.

17. because we’ve assumed ourselves too incapable, too addictive (to ie: drugs, alcohol,
violence, war, …) when perhaps we just need the luxury to do something else.

18. us

19. us

20. or the rat
or the cage

21. us

23. perhaps this is something we’ve not yet done.. collectively.

24. intro’d to rat park and Bruce while reading Johann
Hari‘s chasing the scream.
Johann writes:
We have to build a society
that looks more like Rat Park
and less like a rat race.
Hari, Johann (2015-01-20). Chasing the Scream: The First and Last
Days of the War on Drugs (Kindle Locations 4447-4448).
Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

25. perhaps we try a
for people
a means to get us back to us… ie: a more natural state of non-addiction, et al.