This video was first posted in 2015, and has had more than 11.5 million downloads. Grace Harris, an ACEs Connection member from Santa Rosa, CA, just reminded me of it today.
I hope many of those people who've watched this video are physicians and people who work in substance abuse clinics, so that we all understand that the solution to our substance abuse problems is to make sure we all live in Rat Park.
If you haven't a clue as to what I'm talking about, take six minutes to watch this, and it'll all make sense.
btw, Dr. Bruce Alexander did the Rat Park studies at Simon Fraser University. Here's an excerpt of an article he wrote on his website that's worth reading:
Rat Park closed forever more than 30 years ago. In its heyday, it was a very large plywood box on the floor of my addiction laboratory at Simon Fraser University. 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.
Who could be surprised by this finding? 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. I call this idea the “Myth of the Demon Drug.” This myth was the backbone of mainstream theories of addiction in those days.
The results of the Rat Park experiments were duly published in peer-reviewed psychopharmacology journals in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The basic finding was later replicated and extended by other researchers in other laboratories (The first of the replications was by Schenk, S., Lacelle, G., Gorman, K., and Amit, Z. (1987) Neuroscience Letters, 81, 227–231. The most recent extension that I have found was by Solinas, M., Thiriet, N., El Rawas, R., Lardeux, V., and Jaber, M. (2009). Neuropsychopharmacology, 34, 1102–1111.)
Subsequent research on human beings has confirmed that basic finding that the great majority of individuals in reasonably healthy social environments who use the so called "addictive drugs" do not become addicted. Our little research group imagined that this line of research would rid the world of the Demon Drug Myth, but life is not that simple.
To continue reading, go to: http://brucekalexander.com/art...s-the-new-york-times
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