Is Addiction a Societal Issue?

This post explores Bruce Alexander’s fascinating Rat Park experiment and Dislocation Theory. We have previously spoken about substance abuse and the brain, but these important experiments performed in Canada in the late 1970s provide valuable additional insight into the elusive concept of addiction that humans have been attempting to understand for centuries. 

An overview

Bruce Alexander is an addiction expert and psychologist who theorized that addiction is motivated primarily by psychological and societal factors. This is in stark contrast to the preceding mainstream notion that addiction is driven by drugs themselves, or an inherent quality in individuals. 

Previous addiction experiments 

Before the Rat Park study, addiction research had been conducted in which rats were isolated in small cages and given continual access to a range of drugs, including amphetamine, cocaine, morphine, and heroin. 

The experiments broadly concluded that, as the rats consumed large amounts of these substances and often ended up dying, the drugs themselves were innately addictive.  However, what these Skinners Boxes failed to investigate was the environment the rats were living in. 

Rat Park

Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University sought to challenge the inferences from the aforementioned research. Instead of creating an environment of isolation for the rats, Rat Park was designed: with plenty of space, platforms, running wheels, and, importantly, other rats. 

The team observed that the consumption of the drugs that were on offer to the rats differed greatly from previous studies on isolated rats. Overall, the rats in Rat Park showed a far lesser propensity for addiction than the isolated rats, even when they were force-fed drugs to try and build an addiction. 

So, what are the implications? 

Rat Park helped Bruce Alexander form his Dislocation Theory, and confronted the assumption that addiction is a weakness, moral failure, or a result of drugs themselves. The theory doesn’t discount personal responsibility altogether in forming the picture of addiction, however, it recenters societal issues as a fundamental cause of addiction. 

Alexander saw that a “lack of attachment, belonging, identity, meaning, [and] purpose” all contributed to dislocation. Modern societal arrangements, economic forces, consumerism, competitiveness, and alienation in our environments cause us to become disengaged with the unifying forces that drive our well-being, such as “family, friends, meaning and values.” 

Summing up 

Alexander’s research provides us with a wider picture of addiction that allows for the crucial context of our environment to be considered. Addiction itself is partly the result of structural and functional brain variations, but the circumstances that form addiction are highly complex and multi-faceted. In particular, the study highlighted the importance of community and social interaction, although there are a wealth of other contributing factors that are required for a healthy and happy brain that can avoid, or overcome, addiction.