By Christina Dent
When Dr. Bruce Alexander arrived at an addiction clinic on his first day of work as a psychology student in the 1970s, he was nervous because he had grown up hearing that people addicted to drugs are bad people. But he quickly saw that the people he was treating had reasons for their drug use that made sense in the context of the pain in their lives, even if they were coping in a very unhealthy way.
With more than 16 percent of Mississippi adults struggling with a substance use disorder today, many families are trying to understand what happened to their loved ones and how to help them. There is hope, and an experiment Dr. Alexander conducted called Rat Park illustrates why we have to shift our focus from the drugs people use to the reasons people use them.
About the same time Dr. Alexander started work in the addiction clinic, he heard about a recent set of experiments using rats in cages. The rats could push a lever and get heroin or cocaine anytime they wanted it. They often pushed the lever, sometimes pushing it so frequently that they overdosed and died. The experiments were widely publicized as proof that drugs enslave and are the cause of addiction.
However, Dr. Alexander knew that rats are highly social creatures who love to play, explore, and socialize, like humans. Yet the previous experiments put each rat in a small, empty box, alone. So Dr. Alexander and several colleagues did their own experiment. They kept the lever for the rats to get drugs, but they built a new environment called Rat Park. It had lots of room, toys to play with, and plenty of rat friends. Even though the rats could get drugs anytime they wanted, they rarely pushed the lever and never pushed it compulsively. In Rat Park, they preferred to be sober.
Dr. Alexander concluded that rats’ drug use wasn’t driven by the drug. It was driven by their environment and experiences. When they were happy and fulfilled, they didn’t want drugs. When they were suffering, they used drugs excessively. Dr. Alexander saw this reality in the lives of countless clients over the next 50 years of his career studying and treating addiction.
I saw this reality as a foster mom in Mississippi’s child welfare system and was similarly changed by the realization that people struggling with addiction are people just like me, trying to cope with life in a world gone terribly wrong.
No matter how destructive an addiction is to the person struggling or to the people who love them, it will only be overcome by focusing on healing the hurt that’s underneath it, not on the drugs being used to cope with it.
Christina Dent is the founder and president of the nonprofit End It For Good and the author of “Curious: A Foster Mom’s Discovery of an Unexpected Solution to Drugs and Addiction.” She lives with her family in Ridgeland.