positivemotivation:

theheadlesshashasheen-deactivat:

One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat
experiments – ones that were injected into the American psyche in the
1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage,
alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water
laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment,
the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming
back for more and more, until it kills itself.

The advert
explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory
rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called
cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”

But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander
noticed something odd about 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 Professor Alexander built
Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and
the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends:
everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know,
will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both
water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what
happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn’t like
the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a
quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While
all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the
rats who had a happy environment did.

Yep. Addiction starts and ends with pain. Portugal and Spain proved this when they classified drug use as a medical condition and not a crime.

And any recovered addict will tell you this.

The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think