By Kyra-lin Hom

There is a modern, 'tried and true' narrative of addiction. It involves chemicals, brain structure, something called the reward circuit, maybe another thing called the pleasure principle – and quite simply it's all very neurologically technical. But what if the story isn't quite that complicated? Or rather, what if the important, complicated bits aren't the ones we think they are?

A reexamination of a classic rat experiment asks just these questions. And it isn't a modern reexamination either. The initial experiment is one you might be familiar with thanks to 1980's adverts by Drug-Free America. A researcher put a lone rat in a sterile, blank cage with two water bottles. One bottle contained regular water, the other water laced with cocaine. The rat eventually drank the drug-laced liquid until it died of an overdose. The conclusions seemed clear and overwhelming.

But around this same time professor of Psychology Bruce Alexander was giving the experiment a more realistic twist. Instead of putting one rat in a single, dull, lifeless cage, he put many rats into an environment specially designed to meet all of a rat's biological and social needs. He called this “Rat Park.” Turns out that when rats are happy, stimulated and socially content, cocaine-water is significantly less interesting. In fact, one might go so far as to say the rats in this environment shunned the drug.

With this under his belt, Alexander went one further. He put rats in the same conditions as the original, sterile test for nearly two months, letting them become thoroughly hooked. Then he introduced them to Rat Park. After a few withdrawal hiccups, they too began to shun the drug. They were perfectly content to live happy and healthy without it. The drug had only ever been a coping mechanism for a dull, lifeless existence.

Documented wild animal behavior supports these outcomes as well. Here are a couple examples for you. In Hawaii, Professor Ronald K. Siegel witnessed a previously 'sober' mongoose binge on hallucinogenic plants after a tropical storm killed its mate and destroyed its territory. In Vietnam, water buffalo that had previously steered clear of the local opium went to town on it once the bombs started to drop. Not always but often in the wild, animals turn to mind-altering substances when life stresses them out beyond their ability to cope.

So why are humans any different? I mean, we certainly could be different. We can do complex mathematics, build beautiful structures hundreds of feet into the air and launch into space. Maybe we are completely separate from our lowly animal counterparts. But if that were true, why have we bothered with animal behavior experiments for so many years? If our rational minds truly set us apart, it shouldn't matter what rats in a cage do. Their behavior should have no bearing on ours.

But behavioral scientists use animals as human substitutes all the time. So again I ask, why are we any different? Assuming that this theory of addiction is true (I'm no scientist – I couldn't say one way or the other), our approach to addicted individuals and drugs in general is entirely wrong. Isolation, alienation and prison are the exact things guaranteed to drive a user deeper into the drug.

Whatever you believe, one this is clear: our nation's current attitude towards drugs isn't working. Perhaps a new approach, a social approach focused on creating humanity's version of Rat Park might be just what we need.