Despite All Our Rage: Social Dislocation in the 21st Century
We tend to understand addiction as a simple matter– substances hook your body, hijack the brain, and overwhelm the nerves. It’s a humbling thought, to imagine our bodies so susceptible to a tiny chemicalimbalance. We think of drugs as so powerful that they’ll take you captive no matter who you are. All it would take is the slightest push in the wrong direction to set yourself down an inescapable path of suffering and dependence. This remains the common framework, though some have challenged it. Canadian Psychologist and retired professor Bruce K. Alexander stands among them. Known for his controversial ‘Rat Park’ experiment conducted in the late 1970s, which entailed the observation of rats living in two stark environments: the park and the cage. Both groups were given access to water laced with morphine; surprisingly though, only the caged rats displayed repeated, severe dependence on the liquid concoction. These striking findings suggest that the difference between developing an addi...