Most of us are in a situation closer to this one. He’d press the lever a few times and get nothing from it, then go back to getting high. If the rat in the first cage had a second lever that did nothing, but once he pressed it 10,000 times he’d be dropped into rat park, he’d never get there. The rats didn’t have to do anything, they were dropped into an addiction-free lifestyle. But also because there is no one to create it for us.
Not only because we can’t create an idyllic playground to give us everlasting satisfaction. Rat Park was excellent for demonstrating how important the environment is in shaping addiction, but we can never create a similar situation to the one the rats were thrust into. We imagine ourselves to be these omnipotent masters of our fate when we’re more often the stupid rat in the cage pulling the lever until we die. We can read about the rat pulling the cocaine pellet lever until it dies and laugh about how stupid the rat is between checking Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. The problem is that we dramatically overestimate how much power “we,” the ideal, rational, second-order-thinking self has. We can think about thinking, we can conceptualize what will happen in the future based on current decisions, and we can try to override our instincts to pursue some greater payoff. We’re not just instinctual rats reacting to our environments. One of our greatest strengths and weaknesses as humans is our second-order thinking. We don’t have benevolent researchers to create a perfect park for us. It’s not the rat’s fault, and it’s not the drugs, it’s the park. The environment was the problem! If we figure out what environmental changes need to happen to help anyone escape addiction, then addiction and overdose would never be an issue. They got high, then went back to running around and making little babies with all their Rat Park companions. Now what? The rats still tried the drugs, but they didn’t become slaves to them. And in the corner, a little lever giving access to the same drugs as before. Space to run around, friends to play and mate with, abundant delicious food, everything a rat could hope for. Instead of putting the rats in jail, they put them in a little rat Utopia. So they devised a new experiment: Rat Park.
#RAT UTOPIA ADDICTION FULL#
I’d absolutely go full Scarface if the alternative was rolling around a cage suckling water hoping for salvation. If you were stuck in a cage with nothing but food, water, and drugs, you’d probably pull that lever until you died too. Then a smarter group of researchers had another idea.
The power of the drug is too much to resist. Drugs are insanely addictive, and we shouldn’t blame people for dying from addiction. Give the rat the drug lever and he’ll keep pulling it till he dies. But across most of these experiments, the result was the same. Once the rats figured the lever out, they pulled it until they died. The lever would release a dose of morphine or some other drug so the researchers could assess how often the rat would pull the lever and use the drugs. They put rats in cages with food, water, and a lever. These researchers wanted to understand addiction, so they designed a simple experiment. Once upon a time, there were some researchers.
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