Bruce Alexander did the research in the 70′s – but it’s still pretty salient.
Bruce considered that the pathetic, cold, isolated conditions in most lab experiments on rats were analogous to the shitty life that most smack-addicts live, and considered that perhaps it’s not the heroin but the hopeless circumstances that drives people (and rats) to abuse substances.
With a cannula jammed in your brain wouldn't you too become a junkie?
If given the choice of utter boredom, no panky time with girl-rats and just a single button that creates an artificial euphoria, wouldn’t we too sit around all day twiddling ourselves to oblivion?
So why don’t we? Smack ain’t hard to find.
So Alexander created ‘Rat Park’ – a 95 square-foot enclosure with plenty of food, fun running wheels and places to create nests and make little ugly pink blind rat-babies. Rabies! He also included a tunnel that ended with a drinking dish of tap water and one of methodone water that was sweetened with sugar (‘cos smack tastes yuck).
What Alexander found was that given optimal living conditions, the rats would reject the methodone (smack) water in favour of working out on the wheel, preening oneself and making sexy time with sweet-ass, uncannulated rat-chicks.
Even if he forced the rats to drink smack water for 57 days of their life (which is like a college degree in rat-years) the rats would put up with the withdrawal symptoms and go clean once they were introduced into lab-rat utopia.
The study suggests that our current model of addiction is shit, and rather than being the fault of the substance, addiction is much more likely a result of one’s circumstances.
Levitt and Dubner also touch on this in their book ‘Superfreakonomics’ – where a drug cesnsus showed barely 1% of people who have tried smack become addicted.
So perhaps we need a new view on prohibition. Perhaps there is more to rebabilitation than simply trying to make substances less available.
Over 90% of the world’s opium (which turns into smack) comes from Afghanistan. Half comes from the Helmand province alone.
Your soldiers are dying from bullets shot from guns bought with smack.
Smack is sold to junkies on your streets by gangsters who also have guns.
All because the smack is illegal.
Otherwise it is grown by farmers, and sold by shops. No gangsters, to terrorists.
Just junkies with shitty living conditions.
Perhaps we ought focus our attention on the shitty living conditions.
