SFU PROFESSOR EXAMINES SOCIETY'S AFFECT ON ADDICTIVE PERSONALITIES

From the Downtown Eastside to Online Gambling

Bruce Alexander's research on addiction isn't usually the stuff of
newspaper headlines. That changed last month when he won the 2007
Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in support of controversy. The National
Post went with the headline, "Addicted to controversy."

"I don't think I'm addicted to controversy," said the soft-spoken SFU
emeritus professor of psychology while accepting his award at the
Wosk Centre for Dialogue. "I don't even like controversy."

Born in New York City, Alexander went from the University of Oregon
to Simon Fraser University in 1970--primarily to avoid the
controversy over Vietnam, he says (although he was not drafted). It
proved harder to avoid the silverback politics of academia, along
with public disapproval for his work. SFU's department of psychology
regularly received letters demanding he be disciplined or fired for
his views on drug addiction. Alexander reluctantly refused to write
letters of recommendation for some of his students, feeling his name
was poison in some academic circles. According to Ronald Ydenberg,
SFU biological scientist and chair of the selection committee,
"Professor Alexander's work addresses important local and global
issues, and gives another perspective on addiction. The intense
disapproval it has generated should make thinking people want to take
a look at just what he's saying that is perceived as so dangerous."

The perceived danger involves the social context of drug abuse. In
Alexander's view, all varieties of addiction--from the junkie tying
off her arm in a Hastings Street alleyway to the middle-class father
returning to an online gaming site--are amplified by social
dislocation and isolation. Conversely, wherever you find strong bonds
of community and a sense of individual purpose, you don't find a high
degree of addictive behaviour.

When he first arrived at SFU, Alexander was "dragooned" into teaching
a course on social issues. Since heroin addiction was one of the
major social issues of the day in 1970, it seemed a natural area of
study given his academic background in behaviourism. "Junkies are
very real, sad human beings," he observed during the prize ceremony
at the Wosk Centre.

"You may think that's perfectly obvious, but I can tell you that it
wasn't perfectly obvious in 1970." Back when Vancouver's West Fourth
Avenue was Canada's Haight Ashbury, they were seen as "criminal
masterminds, totally psychopathic, not really human beings."

This notion--still all the rage among U.S. drug czars--is what
Alexander calls the "demon drug" model. If you take a drug one time
or a few times, you are forever more an addict, spiralling down into
an abyss of crime and self-abuse. Alexander likens this notion to
medieval-era demon possession. "It's not the devil, or a demon that
takes possession of the soul, it's a drug that takes hold of the
dopamine receptors or whatever it is, that turns a person into a
reprobate...only God or a psychologist's supremely attuned knowledge
of conditioned responses could cure them." When Alexander examined
the primary literature, he found the "demon drug" notion rested
almost entirely on animal-based studies, in particular experiments on
drug addiction on rats.

Isolated in cramped metal cages, and tethered to a self-injection
apparatus, the rats would receive an injection of morphine or some
other addictive substance through the jugular vein when they pressed
a bar. Under these circumstances, rats would constantly press the bar
until they were exhausted.

Yet rats are extremely gregarious, colonial animals, notes the prof.
You shouldn't be too surprised if they anaesthetize themselves under
isolation. "The rats in the boxes are essentially being tortured," he
added. Ostracism and isolation are terrible conditions for any social
animal, human beings included. "Even now, most sophisticated forms of
torture use solitary confinement."

But what if you exposed the rats to addictive drugs under humane
conditions? From 1977 to 1982, Alexander and his colleagues at SFU
studied the results in their "Rat Park," a housing colony 200 times
the square footage of a standard laboratory cage, with plenty of
food, playthings and other rats.

"It's easy to give rats a Garden of Eden; they're not fussy," he
observes. Given the choice between morphine-laced water and plain tap
water, even pre-hooked rats mostly preferred the latter. The
conclusion: as much as the demon drug model depended on rats, the
cage/lever studies offered a "fallacious proof, with an artifact in it."

In 2001, Alexander told the Senate that what the isolated, caged rats
really prove is that "severely distressed animals, like severely
distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if
they can." More on that next week, and Alexander's thesis on the
globalization of addiction.