What the "Rat Park" experiment teaches us about recovery

Christina Dent, Founder of End it for Good, tells all

Apr 27, 2024

This week, Christina Dent, Founder of End it for Good and the author of the new book, Curious: A Foster Mom's Discovery of an Unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction joins the letter and shares a transformative and powerful lesson she learned about recovery.

With more than 16% of Mississippi adults struggling with a substance use disorder, many families are trying to understand what happened to their loved one and how to engage in a helpful way. Addiction is a complex health crisis, but an experiment called Rat Park is helping us understand it better. There is hope, and there are better solutions that save lives and help more people and families thrive. But first, we have to shift our focus from the drugs to the reason people use them.

Dr. Bruce Alexander grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s hearing a lot of the same messaging used today about drugs. People who use drugs are bad, and so are people who become addicted to them, he learned. But the ultimate enemy is the drug itself.

As an adult, Dr. Alexander became a psychologist and was assigned to work at an addiction treatment clinic. He was nervous because he had been taught that people struggling with addiction were liars and thieves. As he worked at the clinic, he started seeing something unexpected. The people he was treating had problems he could easily understand. They had reasons for their drug use that made sense in the context of their life experiences, even if they were coping in a very unhealthy way.

What he was seeing went directly against the conclusion of a 1960s experiment where a rat was put in a special box that allowed researchers to study its behavior. The rat in this experiment was put in a box with a lever they could push to inject themselves with a little heroin or cocaine. The rat often pressed the lever, sometimes so frequently that it overdosed and died. The experiment was repeated numerous times, and the message that came out was clear. These drugs are so addictive and deadly that if you start using them, you won’t be able to stop until you die. It reinforced the dominant narrative that the power of a drug drives addiction.

However, Dr. Alexander noticed that the experiment didn’t match up with what we know about rats. They are highly social creatures, like humans. They love to play, explore, and socialize. Yet the boxes used in the experiments were small and empty, and the rat was alone. So Dr. Alexander and several colleagues did their own experiment. They kept the lever for the rats to get drugs anytime they wanted, but they built a new environment called Rat Park on the floor of their laboratory. It had lots of room, toys to climb on, and plenty of rat friends. It was everything a rat could want. In a shocking twist, even though the rats could push the lever to get drugs any time they wanted to, they rarely did. In Rat Park, they preferred to be sober.

Dr. Alexander concluded that rats’ drug use wasn’t driven by the drug. It was driven by their environment. When they were happy and had their needs met, they didn’t want the drugs. When they were stripped of everything that makes a rat happy, they used drugs excessively.

His results with the rats in Rat Park fit with what he was learning at the clinic from real people struggling with addiction. It was their suffering, not the drug, that led them into addiction.

Every person is influenced and shaped by experiences that happened as recently as this morning, and as long ago as childhood. Behaviors don’t exist in a vacuum. If people struggle with addiction, it doesn’t mean they’re bad. It means they’re hurting.

The hurt could come from abuse, neglect, mental health challenges, disconnection, guilt, loss, isolation - any number of painful experiences. Inflicting blame, shame, and pain has always been a futile way to stop addiction. Now we know why.

James Moore, a Mississippi resident who lost his only son to an overdose several years ago, used to think about his son’s drug use as bad behavior that needed correcting. As he learned and changed, he now describes it as, “A way to turn down the volume of the things that are hurting you.” If we want to meaningfully address addiction, we have to focus on the pain driving it, not the drug being used to cope.

Arresting people for drug use will never solve the addiction crisis because it uses pain to try to solve a problem that is made worse by pain. Healing, not handcuffs, is the path out of the addiction crisis.

This article is adapted from a chapter in Curious: A Foster Mom’s Discovery of an Unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction by Christina Dent. Christina is the Founder & President of the nonprofit End It For Good which invites people to support approaches to drugs that prioritize life, preserve families, and promote public safety.

Learn more about Christina’s work here.

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