Brands's List: Security

"In the case of natives of Western Canada, other historical information makes it perfectly clear that a simple genetic vulnerability to alcohol was not the cause of the devastating plague of alcoholism that occurred. There are several different types of evidence:

1. In cases where alcohol was available to natives, but their cultures were not destroyed, they were able to incorporate alcohol into their native traditions without too much trouble. People drank and some people got plenty drunk on some occasions, but there was no widespread alcoholism.

2. In cases where native cultures were destroyed, but alcohol was not available, native people showed many of the symptoms that are associated with mass alcoholism, without ever tasting a drop. In other words, people stopped doing productive work and taking care of their families and concentrated on aping the manners of the English invaders and idling away their time. Criminality and child neglect became problems, where they had not been before. But alcohol was not the cause because there wasn’t any!

3. We now know that native people whose cultures have been destroyed are vulnerable to all the addictions that white people are. If Indians whose cultures have been destroyed have a genetic weakness for alcohol, they also have a genetic weakness for drugs, television, gambling, bingo, Internet, and dysfunctional love relationships!

If the alcohol itself was not the cause of native alcoholism, what was? The great advantage of doing our research with human beings rather than rodents is that people are often willing to tell us the answer to our questions. Native people have described the anguish of being deprived of their traditional cultures and social networks in eloquent language and have explained how drunkeness relieved their misery temporarily, even as it ultimately led to self-destruction.
Fig 8

When I look at the pictures of our caged rats now, it is easy for me to think that I detect something similar to the anguish or rage that native people describe when their cultures are destroyed. However not everyone agrees. Some people seem to think that rats are pretty inscrutable.

There is no way to resolve an argument what rats are feeling. So I have never gone back to rat experimentation but have instead searched out more and more parallels in the literature of human history and anthropology. This work is still in progress. There is no shortage of parallels from people of all races and many cultures.

When I talk to addicted people, whether they are addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling, Internet use, sex, or anything else, I encounter human beings who really do not have a viable social or cultural life. They use their addictions as a way of coping with their dislocation: as an escape, a pain killer, or a kind of substitute for a full life. More and more psychologists and psychiatrists are reporting similar observations. Maybe our fragmented, mobile, ever-changing modern society has produced social and cultural isolation in very large numbers of people, even though their cages are invisible!

The view of addiction from Rat Park is that today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, hypercompetitive, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social and culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief. They find temporary relief in addiction to drugs or any of a thousand other habits and pursuits because addiction allows them to escape from their feelings, to deaden their senses, and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life.

At this point, it is too early to say conclusively if the Rat Park view of addiction is right or not, but it is not too early to be sure that the old theory that addiction is a problem caused by addictive drugs is far too simple. Huge amounts of research money have been spent researching the idea that addictive drugs are the cause of addiction and treatments based on that idea have been tried over the world. In the meantime, the once-small problem of addiction has globalized. Moreover, it has become absolutely clear that drug and alcohol addiction is only a corner of a much larger addiction problem!

It is definitely time for a fresh direction in the theory of addiction, and I have a hunch – as well as a hope – that Rat Park might provide the starting point. The next steps from this starting point are explained in my book The Globalization of Addiction: A study in poverty of the spirit. (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010)."