what causes, say, heroin addiction? this is a really stupid question, right? it’s obvious; we all know it; heroin causes heroin addiction. here’s how it works: if you use heroin for 20 days, by day 21, your body would physicallycrave the drug ferociously because there arechemical hooks in the drug. that’s what addiction means.
but there’s a catch. almost everything we thinkwe know about addiction is wrong. if you, for example, break your hip,you’ll be taken to a hospital and you’ll be given loads of diamorphinefor weeks or even months. diamorphine is heroin. it’s, in fact, much stronger heroin thanany addict can get on the street because it’s not contaminated by allthe stuff drug dealers dilute it with. there are people near you being given loads of deluxe heroinin hospitals right now.
so at least some of themshould become addicts? but this has been closelystudied; it doesn’t happen. your grandmother wasn’t turned intoa junkie by her hip replacement. why is that? our current theory of addiction comes inpart from a series of experiments that were carried out earlierin the 20th century. the experiment is simple: you take a rat and put it in acage with two water bottles. one is just water, the other is waterlaced with heroin or cocaine.
almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessedwith the drugged water and keep coming back formore and more, until it kills itself. but in the 1970s, bruce alexander,a professor of psychology, noticed something oddabout this experiment: the rat is put in the cage all alone. it has nothing to do but take the drugs. what would happen, he wondered,if we tried this differently? so he built rat park, which isbasically heaven for rats;
it’s a lush cage where the rats would havecolored balls, tunnels to scamper down, plenty of friends to play with,and they could have loads of sex— everything a rat about town could want. and they would have the drugged waterand the normal water bottles. but here’s the fascinating thing: in rat park, rats hardlyever use the drugged water; none of them ever use it compulsively;none of them ever overdose. but maybe this is a quirk of rats, right? well, helpfully, there was a humanexperiment along the same lines:
the vietnam war. 20% of american troops in vietnamwere using a lot of heroin. people back home were really panicked, because they thought there would behundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the united stateswhen the war was over. but a study followed the soliders homeand found something striking: they didn’t go to rehab; they didn’teven go into withdrawal; 95% of them just stoppedafter they got home. if you believe the old theory ofaddiction, that makes no sense.
but if you believe prof. alexander’stheory, it makes perfect sense, because if you’re put into a horrificjungle in a foreign country where you don’t want to be, and you couldbe forced to kill or die at any moment, doing heroin is a great wayto spend your time; but if you go back to your nicehome with your friends and your family, it’s the equivalent of beingtaken out of that first cage and put into a human rat park; it’s not the chemicals, it’s your cage. we need to think aboutaddiction differently.
human beings have an innateneed to bond and connect. when we are happy and healthy, we willbond with the people around us. but when we can’t, because we’re traumatized, isolated,or beaten down by life, we will bond with somethingthat gives us some sense of relief. it might be endlesslychecking a smartphone; it might be pornography, video games,reddit, gambling, or it might be cocaine. but we will bond with something,because that is our human nature. the path out of unhealthybonds is to form healthy bonds,
to be connected to peopleyou want to be present with. addiction is just one symptom ofthe crisis of disconnection that’s happening all around us. we all feel it. since the 1950s, the average number ofclose friends an american has has been steadily declining. at the same time, the amount offloor space in their homes has been steadily increasing. to choose floor space over friends,to choose stuff over connection.
the war on drugs we’ve beenfighting for almost a century now has made everything worse. instead of helping people healand getting their life together, we have cast them out from society, we have made it harder for themto get jobs and become stable, we take benefits and support away fromthem if we catch them with drugs, we throw them in prison cells,which are literally cages, we put people who are not well in a situation which makes them feel worseand hate them for not recovering.
for too long, we’ve talked only aboutindividual recovery from addiction. but we need now totalk about social recovery. because something has gonewrong with us as a group. we have to build a society thatlooks a lot more like rat park and a lot less like those isolated cages. we are going to have to changethe unnatural way we live and rediscover each other. the opposite of addiction is not sobriety;the opposite of addiction is connection. this video is a collaborationwith johann hari,
the author of the book “chasing the scream: the first and lastdays of the war on drugsâ€. he was very kind to work with uson this video to spread the word. we recommend that you give the book a try. our videos are made thanksto your support on patreon.com. if you want to help us make more of them,we really appreciate your support. we made an interactive version of thisvideo together with some friends. see the link in the description. subtitles by the amara.org community