Rat Park

yeah if I and this is not easy okay this is a you know healing is always a process but But what you just said has been clinically verified.

Do you know about the Rat Park experiment? Yeah.

Yeah, right? Yes.

Amazing.

I want to finish with a story and then I want to ask you how we can learn more, like how we can follow you further.

Has everybody here or any, I should say, has anybody here heard of the Rat Park study? The rat park study?

I think I have.

You may be thinking this.

But if it's acting on a lever in our brains that is naturally just like, oops, I got real excited about that substance, which a lot of us have a lever of some kind where there is some substance where our brain is like, I am too excited.

But then if that's a lever that's activated because something has gone haywire in a person or because society is broken in a way that makes people in so much – we talk about Rat Park so much, right? Like if the solution is medicine or Rat Park.

And a lot of what I see in the headlines, in the it could cure everything, is a – It is your fault that you are having a disordered response to a fucked up world.

And is a let's make it a personal individual medical problem rather than something that we solve by having places people can walk around and food they can eat.

They lost weight.

Ask yourself some questions about what's going on there and what kind of assumptions you've made about bodies and which ones are good or what is good for people.

And I think we need to really take seriously the need to build Rat Park because we're not going to succeed in studying our way out of a problem that is social justice.

But we can build pieces of Rat Park, build places where people can come.

So I think, well, hang on a minute.

Those rats were alone in an empty cage where they've got nothing to do except use this drug, right? What would happen if we did this differently? So he built a cage that he called Rat Park.

Rat Park is basically heaven for rats, right? They've got loads of friends.

They've got loads of cheese.

They've got loads of colored balls.

They can have loads of sex.

Anything a rat wants.

it's in rat park right and they've got both the water bottles the normal water and the drugged water but this is the fascinating thing of course they try both they don't know what's in them in rat park they don't like the drug water that much they use it but none of them use it compulsively and none of them ever overdose so you go from almost 100 percent compulsive use and death by overdose when they don't have the things that make life meaningful to none when they do have the things that make life meaningful.

yeah and i think a couple of crucial bits of context then kind of emerged in the sort of following decades you know one which people did point out at the time was well if you stick rats who are very social, clever creatures, in a cage on their own and give them a sort of miserable prison-like existence, then they'll do anything to get out of it.

And there was that famous Rat Park experiment, which was done with drugs, with morphine, which rats in a cage would endlessly press the button for more morphine.

But if they were allowed out into a social environment with lots of their friends and lots of stimulation, they weren't that bothered.

So That came along and also along came a new model of the brain where there isn't a single pleasure centre.

It's a British journalist named Johan Hari.

He popularized an experiment that had existed for a long time called Rat Park.

You're nodding your head.

I'm sure you're very familiar with Rat Park.

But I'll say it for your audience in case they don't know it.

You know, you have a group of rats.

And...

And so he had that rat park where he figured basically if the rat has a life, drugs lose importance.

And he said, it's not like they don't do drugs anymore.

It's just that they don't, that's no longer the center of their lives.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's interesting.

It's like just kind of not being in the right place in life, not being, you know, essentially the literal meaning of that term and how it's like, oh, I mean, when I learned about Rat Park, I was in a treatment center, actually, for addiction and depression.

And there was a guy who was an MD who studies whether addiction is a disease or not.

I can't remember his first name, but that was his surname.

They were called the Rat Park Experiments, and they were trying to understand why some soldiers became addicted to stimulants in the First and Second World Wars and others didn't.

They were using rats in cages, giving them drip bottles of just water or water with cocaine.

Guess what? They drank the water with cocaine first.

You've got a choice between water and water and Coke.

You know what I mean? Anyway, then they developed these experiments into trying to create an environment that would simulate something more akin to what a rat would experience in the wild.

So they created rat parks.

So quite intricate, multi-layer enclosure.