Researching the Cause of Addiction
For a century, we have been taught by medicine and governments that drugs themselves are addictive. If you use them, the DRUGS will addict you, a doctrine so deeply ingrained in our minds that we don’t bother to question it. What causes drug addiction? Drugs, of course.
Wrong. In the 1960s, researchers put a number of rats in individual cages with two water bottles—one containing water alone and the other filled with cocaine-dosed water.
Nearly all the rats became obsessed with the drugged water, consuming more and more until they died. Advertisements by an anti-drug organization in the 1980s declared, “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it and use it until they die. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But Professor Bruce Alexander noticed that in the study, rats were put in the cage all alone—a stressful condition. They had nothing to do but take the drugs. He wondered what would happen if the rats were treated differently.
So Dr. Alexander built Rat Park, a large cage containing many rats who had access to good food, toys, places to hide and exercise. And they had the same two bottles, one with plain water and the other with drugged water.
What happened? In Rat Park, all the rats drank from both water bottles, but in this pleasant environment, the rats did not prefer the drugged water. There were no addicts or deaths.
The Cause of Addiction is a Response to Pain
Professor Alexander summed up his discoveries by saying that addiction is a response to pain. “Addiction is not you,” he said. “It’s a response to your cage.”
The professor went a step further. He repeated the first experiment, where nearly all the rats became addicted—just like the first time. Then he transferred the addicted rats to Rat Park, and he discovered that after a brief withdrawal, they stopped their drug use and joined the play of the happy rats in the Park.
What did Dr. Alexander’s experiments prove? The same thing we’ve been saying in Real Love for nearly 30 years. Addiction is not a disease. It’s a response to pain, and people become addicted to drugs NOT because of the addictive potential of the medication but because of the emotional pain people were in before taking the drugs.
Solution to Addiction is Relief of Emotional Pain
So the solution to addiction is not forced sobriety. It’s the genuine relief of emotional pain that comes from feeling loved.
The writer George Monbiot has called this "the age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Instead of genuinely loving each other, we text, check social media, use porn, take selfies, and feel alone.
We can learn to do this differently. We can learn to feel loved and to love others. And then we’ll have no need to become addicted to drugs, alcohol, anger, fear, screen time, porn, or anything else that temporarily diminishes our emotional pain.
