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TELL US WHAT YOU THINK: Get a rat, put it in a cage, and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine.

If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So, there you go. It’s our theory of addiction.

A man named Bruce K. Alexander came along in the ’70s and said, ‘Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.’

So, Bruce built Rat Park. The Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want. It’s located in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want.

They’ve also got both water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water.

They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction.

What Bruce says shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. The right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, and you party too hard.

The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.

We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right?

We’ve created a hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. But our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things, not people.

You are not a good consumer capitalist citizen if you spend time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff. In fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes, dreams, and ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.’ — Johann Hari

QUOTABLE QUOTE: ‘There is no more respect, no word. Only money matters. We hear about crime all day. I know I’ll leave the world without regret. Life doesn’t give me much anymore, I know everything, and I’ve seen everything. But first of all, I hate this age.’ ~ Alain Delon (88) Paris Match. PLEASE SHARE OUR GREAT STORIES.

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