Law of Attraction Magazine October, 2015 | Page 54

I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine
if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the
street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are
strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped
on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical.
We would have a ferocious craving. We would be
addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the ways this theory was first established is
through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into
the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by
the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may
remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a
cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The
other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every
time you run this experiment, the rat will become
obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back
for more and more, until it kills itself.

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
to 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.

The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine
out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use
it. Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound
challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a
moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and
the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a
chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an
adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage.

Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same
thing to you."
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