"The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think"
Last edited Fri Jan 23, 2015, 01:25 AM - Edit history (1)
this is a very interesting article to check out:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html
"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.
"At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about the head home when the war ended.
"But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more."
more at the above link
on edit: this is a duplicate thread. please go to the original posting here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026120556
= new reply since forum marked as read
