Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari · 20 Jan 2015 · 513pp · 141,963 words
enough. As Gabor worked at the Portland, not far away, on another part of the Downtown Eastside, another man was working, a professor named Bruce Alexander. He agreed with Gabor’s analysis about childhood trauma, but he was trying to answer this further question. Some people do not have traumatic childhoods
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people who use this place would you consider to be write-offs?” She paused and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell him that the answer is none. Chapter 13 Batman’s Bad Call Bruce Alexander received his first lesson about addiction from Batman. As a small kid, he
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for rats. Within its plywood walls,11 it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with. He called it Rat Park.12 In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles
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the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things
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your chemical compulsions. He took a set of rats13 and made them drink the morphine solution for fifty-seven days, in their cage, alone. If drugs can hijack your brain, that will definitely do it. Then he put these junkies into Rat Park. Would they carry on using compulsively, even when their
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environment improved? Had the drug taken them over? In Rat Park, the junkie rats seemed to have some twitches of withdrawal—but quite quickly, they stopped
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drinking the morphine. A happy social environment, it seemed, freed them of their addiction. In Rat Park, Bruce writes, “nothing that we tried14 instilled a strong appetite for morphine or produced anything that looked to us like addiction.” Bruce naturally wanted to
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earlier understanding of addiction but seemed to him the only way to explain all this evidence. If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages
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or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively. One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.” Rat Park seems to fill some of the holes in our understanding of addiction, but at first
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of the picture. There is a powerful political brake on exploring these deeper truths. And that, it turns out, is what happened to Bruce. Once the nature of their findings became clear, the money for the Rat Park experiment provided by his university was abruptly cut off, before the team had a chance
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far outside the conventional understanding of addiction seemed crazy. To a sober-minded military brat raised in a conservative family, the experience of Rat Park and the heroin famines was startling, and it changed how Bruce saw the world. “It’s amazing to discover that something which is so centrally believed is false. It
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amazing,” he says. “I suppose you could say it’s poisoned my entire outlook on life.” Nobody has ever received funding to replicate the Rat Park experiment. As I walked the streets of Vancouver trying to digest all this, I began to think again about the very beginning of this story
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was clear that it was having the opposite effect to the one that was intended—that it was increasing addiction and supercharging crime—why was it intensified, rather than abandoned? I think Bruce Alexander’s breakthrough may hold the answer. “Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live
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fills us with panic. All this stuff, Bruce believes, is filling the hole where normal human connection should be. Unless we learn the lesson of Rat Park, Bruce says we will face a worse problem than the drug war. We will find ourselves on a planet trashed by the manic consumption that
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they seemed to have more dignity than the people screaming at them that they should just go away and kill themselves. Many people had believed what Bruce Alexander was taught by Batman and his dad—that addicts didn’t care about their lives, or about anything but their next fix. But here they
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alcohol but was still in an empty cage alone, he was chronically suicidal. Now his life was becoming like Rat Park, where he had friends and everything that gives life meaning—and he was finding his desire to use drugs ebbed. “That’s what I wanted—for my spirit to wake up. I
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not seeing? It was only when I discussed this with Meghan Ralston, an expert on prescription drugs with the Drug Policy Alliance, with Professor Bruce Alexander back in Vancouver, and with Dr. Hal Vorse, a medical doctor who treats prescription drug addicts in Oklahoma City, that I began to understand what was really
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To do that, you need to change the culture so people find life less unbearable. We have to build a society that looks more like Rat Park and less like a rat race. If that sounds like pie in the sky, remember the alternative: addiction outbreaks that only swell, like an Oxy slick
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really powerful opiate cause virtually no addiction when given out by doctors, and an opiate that is three times weaker cause so much? This suggests we should look at the other possible explanation—a story taught to me by Bruce Alexander back on the streets of the Downtown Eastside. Bruce showed that
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the problem. It is a tempting story, because it is so simple—and allows us to avert our eyes from how much of this problem was created not by pills, but by people. The Swiss heroin experiment, combined with Rat Park, offers us the best answer not only to heroin, but to the
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feel the urge to nuke my feelings with a well-aimed exocet of chemicals. When this comes, I try to remember what I learned from Bruce Alexander and Bud Osborn. You don’t need a chemical; you need a connection. So I go to the people I love
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recollections; all these fact-checking conversations are recorded. In many cases, they offered clarifications and further information, and these were then incorporated into the text. I went through this process with Chino Hardin, Leigh Maddox, Gabor Maté, Liz Evans, Bruce Alexander, Bud Osborn, John Marks, Ruth Dreifuss, João Goulão, Sergio Rodrigues, Danny Kushlick,
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being smuggled inside women’s vaginas (see Anslinger, Protectors, 4) or “ample bosoms” (49). He seems to have deliberately injected sex into his accounts. 195 Bruce Alexander, Peaceful Measures, 32; Emily Murphy, The Black Candle, 188–89. 196 Murphy, Black Candle, 5. 197 Huang, Charlie Chan, 124. 198 Tong, Chinese Americans,
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1, 2012. 10 This discussion of the experiment is informed heavily by the two original studies of Rat Park by Alexander and colleagues: “The Effect of Housing and Gender on Morphine Self-Administration in Rats,” Psychopharmacology 58, 175–79, and “Effect of Early and Later Colony Housing on Oral Ingestion of Morphine by Rats,” Pharmacology, Biochemistry
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and Behaviour, vol. 15, 571–76. 11 Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box, 165. 12 See “The View from Rat Park” by Bruce K. Alexander, http://globalizationofaddiction.ca/articles-speeches/177-addiction-the-view
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-from-rat-park.html, accessed November 1, 2012. 13 Slater, Opening Skinner’s
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Box, 168. 14 Bruce K. Alexander, Globalizing Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, 195. Although in other interviews and in his writing Bruce has talked
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of Mindless Neuroscience, 49–50. 21 Maté, Hungry Ghosts, 142. DeGrandpre, Cult of Pharmacology, 117. 22 Maté, Hungry Ghosts, 146. 23 Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, 62. Miller, Case for Legalizing Drugs, 54–55. 24 See Bruce K. Alexander, “The Rise and Fall of the Official View of Addiction,” http://globalizationofaddiction.ca/articles-speeches/240-rise
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Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town. 27 Bruce K. Alexander, “The View From Rat Park,” http://globalizationofaddiction.ca/articles-speeches/177-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park.html, accessed March 12, 2013. 28 http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/cohen.addiction.html, accessed February
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of the origins of VANDU is based on my interviews with Bud and others who were there at the time and later—Ann Livingstone, Dean Wilson, Donald MacPherson, Liz Evans, Philip Owen, Gabor Maté, Bruce Alexander, Clare Hacksell, Coco Cuthbertson, Laura Shaver—and writings and documentaries as referenced in the endnotes. 2 http://www.cosmik.com
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You will be asked to pay 20 percent of the costs if you are judged to be able to afford it. 18 João agrees with Bruce Alexander and Gabor Maté that even if the currently banned drugs could be somehow be made to disappear, addicts would simply shift to other addictions. “I
The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease
by Marc Lewis Phd · 13 Jul 2015 · 288pp · 73,297 words
once they returned home. A number of us view this heartening statistic as the human counterpart to what Bruce Alexander demonstrated in his classic “Rat Park” studies.20 Alexander and colleagues offered rats a choice between morphine solution and water. Rats raised in isolated steel cages chose the morphine. But once placed in a large wooden
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those environments. But diseases are based on exposure, not experience. • The powerful attraction to addictive drugs and activities is a response to some degree of psychological suffering, including social isolation and recurring negative emotions. The “Rat Park” studies show that even rats will voluntarily withdraw from narcotics when their environments become more livable, as
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a suggestion for further thought. Several scholars or experts on addiction have proposed that confining social conditions and alienation from one’s culture are major ingredients in the rise of addiction. Bruce Alexander, who conducted the Rat Park studies (reviewed in Chapter One), has outlined a broad social theory of addiction in his 2008 book
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accessible review of these studies is Bruce K. Alexander, “Addiction: The View from Rat Park,” www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park. 21. Carl Hart, High Price: Drugs, Neuroscience, and Discovering Myself (New York: Harper, 2013). 22. Stanton Peele and Ilse Thompson, Recover! Stop Thinking Like an Addict and Reclaim Your Life with The PERFECT
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Academy of Sciences 90, no. 8 (1993): 3593–3597. 2. See Michael J. Chandler and Christopher Lalonde, “Cultural Continuity as a Hedge Against Suicide in Canada’s First Nations,” Transcultural Psychiatry 35, no. 2 (1998): 191–219. 3. Bruce Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 4. Anne M. Fletcher
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, 13, 15–16 prefrontal cortex (PFC), 44 (fig.), 45 grey matter volume and, 137 habits and, 68–69 OFC and, 82 self-control and, 150 symbols and, 144 prison, 64–65 Prohibition, 12 psychology, experience and, 168–169 PTSD. See post-traumatic stress disorder Rat Park study, 21 Reach Out Recovery (ROR), 214 Recognizing Addiction as a Disease
The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour · 20 Aug 2019 · 297pp · 83,651 words
as impoverished in its social life as a culture obsessed with happiness is bitterly depressed. What Bruce Alexander calls the state of permanent ‘psychosocial dislocation’ in late capitalism, with life overrun by the law of markets and competition, is the context for soaring addiction rates.28 It is as if the addictive
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obsession with gratification, the most obvious attribute of addiction in its negative sense is that it kills. And nor is this a purely physical death. The drug addicts of Vancouver’s Hastings Corridor, described by Bruce Alexander, suffer symbolic death, ‘sodden misery’, before their biological death from overdose, suicide, Aids or hepatitis
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14 December 2015. 23. . . . the ‘gamification of capitalism’. Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Verso: London and New York, 2017. 24. Even Skinner’s rats were not Skinner’s rats . . . Bruce K Alexander, ‘Addiction: The View from Rat Park’, 2010 www.brucekalexander.com. 25. Marcus Gilroy-Ware’s study of social media . . . Marcus
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The Happiness Industry, Verso: London and New York, 2015, pp. 241–243 and 253. 12. This was an example . . . Declan McCullagh, ‘Knifing the Baby’, Wired, 5 November 1998; Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things, Strelka Press: Moscow, 2014, Kindle Loc. 200. 13. Drug use . . . Bruce Alexander & Anton Schweighofer, ‘Defining “addiction
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’, Adweek, 4 October 2012. 27. But as the cyberpunk writer . . . Bruce Sterling, quoted in Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art, Simon & Schuster: New York, 2017, p. 25. 28. What Bruce Alexander calls . . . Bruce Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011. 29. . . .
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Raleigh, NC, 2008. 81. . . . Lydia Liu argues . . . Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, MI, 2011, Kindle Loc. 227. 82. The drug addicts . . . Bruce Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, Oxford University Press: Oxford: 2011
Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
by Johann Hari · 1 Jan 2018 · 428pp · 126,013 words
Bruce Alexander spurred me to think differently about mental health in the first place through his life-changing “Rat Park” experiment, which I discussed in my previous book, Chasing the Scream, Jake and Joe Wilkinson helped to shape this book and
Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol
by Holly Glenn Whitaker · 9 Jan 2020 · 334pp · 109,882 words
Bruce Alexander, asserts that addiction is wholly driven by a free-market (capitalist) system. Alexander, the researcher of the Rat Park
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Bruce Alexander
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
by Gabor Mate and Peter A. Levine · 5 Jan 2010 · 504pp · 147,660 words
and destroys.”5 CHAPTER 12 From Vietnam to “Rat Park
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Bruce Alexander
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Bruce Alexander
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and in adults reduces the activity of dopamine-dependent nerve cells.36,37 Unlike rats reared in isolation, rats housed together in stable social groupings resisted cocaine self-administration—in the same way that Bruce Alexander’s tenants in Rat Park
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Bruce Alexander
Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs
by Marc Lewis Phd · 5 Mar 2013 · 332pp · 101,772 words
: COPS AND ANGELS Chapter 8 - HEROIN, THE HEAP, AND THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD Chapter 9 - GETTING DOWN • PART THREE • - GOING PLACES Chapter 10 - TRAVEL BROADENS THE MIND Chapter 11 - CONSCIOUSNESS LOST AND FOUND Chapter 12 - THE OPIUM FIELDS • PART FOUR • - IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH Chapter 13 - NIGHT LIFE IN RAT PARK Chapter 14
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scotch with my brother, I knew it was wrong. I knew the marriage was a mistake. • PART FOUR • IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH 13 NIGHT LIFE IN RAT PARK There was rarely another soul in the subbasement of the Life Sciences building after seven or eight o’clock at night. Just the
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were housed in the usual sort of cage, made of cold steel wire, and isolated, one rat to a cage, others were housed in a “rat park”: a large open-topped wooden box full of wood shavings and other diversions and, most importantly, together in a large group. All rats were offered water or
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morphine to drink. The choice was theirs. But the rats living in Rat Park drank a lot less morphine than
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. p. 247. A unified framework for understanding addictive choices, emphasizing cognitive deficits and errors, was published by Redish, Jensen, and Johnson in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 31, 2008. p. 253. Bruce Alexander, a Canadian psychologist, published the results of his “Rat Park” experiments in Pharmacology, Biochemistry & Behavior, vol. 15, 1981. His findings were