NOSE CANDY AND THE FREUDIANS WHO LOVE IT

Susceptibility to Addiction Depends on Your Environment

Sigmund Freud loved cocaine. He loved it so much, in fact, that he
often doled it out to his friends and family as a treatment for just
about anything: Tired? Cocaine. Seasick? Cocaine. Troubles in the
bedroom? Cocaine. Most famously, Freud prescribed the drug to his
close friend, fellow Austrian physician Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, to
help him overcome an addiction to heroin.

Fleischl-Marxow began using heroin after he lost a thumb in a freak
autopsy accident.

Cocaine, like heroin, is a drug that tends to be abused, and soon
Fleischl- Marxow was doing as much blow as he was smack.

When Fleischl-Marxow finally died from his addictions at the age of
45, Freud felt terrible about pushing cocaine on his friend. "[It was]
like trying to cast out the Devil with Beelzebub," he lamented
(Beelzebub being the Devil's second in command). If only Freud had
spent a little less time speculating about the sexual urges of young
boys and a little more time researching drug abuse (and, perhaps, if
he wasn't a cokehead himself) he might have simply suggested to
Fleischl-Marxow that he find a new place to live. According to a
controversial study published in 1978 by Bruce Alexander of Simon
Fraser University, the abuse of narcotics might have more to with
one's surroundings then it does with physical dependence on a drug.

For almost a century, scientists have noted that laboratory animals
seem to love drugs.

If you put a monkey in a cage and give it a choice between two
buttons, one that delivers a shot of water and one that delivers a
shot of morphine, the creature will gleefully hit the morphine button
over and over again, sucking up every last drop, and neglecting meals
and mates in the process.

Getting rats to do hard drugs is slightly more difficult; you have to
get them addicted first.

Rats that have been forced to drink morphine for a few days will
continue to take the drug even if they are later given a choice not
to. This experiment, in particular, was thought to provide definitive
proof that opiates - morphine and its more powerful derivative, heroin
- - are highly addictive: why would the rats continue to drink morphine
unless they were physically dependent on it? But in 1978, Alexander
thought differently. He reasoned that the rats' continued drug abuse
might simply be a means for the animals to escape the bleak laboratory
environment in which they were housed.

To test this theory, he constructed something of a lab rat utopia,
later dubbed "Rat Park." Rat Park was an open-topped plywood box, 200
times the size of a normal rodent cage, filled with comfy sawdust,
lots of food, and obstacles for the rats to explore.

He then forced several dozen of the animals - some isolated in
standard rodent cages, the rest housed together in Rat Park - to drink
water laced with morphine for 57 days.

On the 58th day, Alexander let the animals choose between morphine and
water.

As dozens of studies had shown before, the caged animals appeared to
be addicted to the drug; they continued to drink morphine. But the
animals housed in Rat Park immediately went back to drinking plain old
water.

After being forced to abuse hard drugs for almost two months, the
rodents housed in Rat Park, it seemed, were not all that addicted to
morphine.

Alexander concluded that in the stimulating world of Rat Park, the
effects of morphine interfered with otherwise enjoyable rat activities
- - mating, nesting, grooming - that weren't available to the caged
animals. In other words, the caged animals weren't physically
dependent on the drug, they were more likely just really, really bored.

Depressed, even. From a human perspective, the Rat Park experiment
suggests that locking drug users away in prison might only make the
problem worse - much like Freud trying to treat his friend's heroin
abuse with cocaine.