Cartoonist Stuart McMillen got his Rat Park drug experiment research right, and tells us how he did it.

Stuart McMillen states in his blog that he draws “long-form comics inspired by social issues involving science, ecology, sustainability, psychology and economics.” His cartoon dialogue sums up the Rat Park findings as follows:

What if the difference between not being addicted and being addicted was the difference between seeing the world as your park and seeing the world as your cage?

See the whole cartoon at this link: Stuart McMillen’s cartoon illustration of Professor Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park research.

A bustle in the cage-row: the making of Rat Park

May 29th, 2013

My comics are borne from extensive research. I am preoccupied with telling the truth, and not misrepresenting the facts for the sake of a good story. For this reason, I have abandoned numerous stories because I could not verify their accuracy, or because I felt I would be stretching analogies past their breaking point.

In the past I’ve told you about my research for St Matthew Island, which drove me to learn the exact subspecies of reindeer introduced to the island. Or the fact that the main character of Thin Air, van Helmont, was actually a bad scientist.

This time I want to tell you some of the things I learnt while researching Rat Park. Including some aspects of the experiments I chose not to include in my comic.

This long article might be ‘one for the fans’ only. But I always appreciate when creative people take time to explain what happens behind their curtains.

So here is ‘the making of Rat Park‘. All will be revealed.

On my way: beginning the research

This comic was my first foray into crowdfunding content for my website. I was confident there was was enough credibility in the Rat Park story to warrant a full comic treatment. However, I didn’t know exactly how long the final comic would be, or how I would structure the story.

As usual, I went overboard with research: tracking down the original scientific papers by the researchers, and reading various books and websites on the broader topic.

I realised that accounts of the Rat Park experiments were often dramatically simplified by writers. Often writers would make claims about the methodology which weren’t supported by the original papers. (See “Other good Rat Park references” below, for my guide to worthy sources).

Unimpressed by this misinformation, I decided to write a definitive comic that stepped through the science of the original experiments. I extended the length of the comic from 28 pages to 40 pages, at zero extra cost to my crowdfunding investors.

Describe what you see: Consulting with Bruce
I was lucky enough to have Professor Bruce Alexander, one of the original Rat Park researchers, review draft versions of my comic. He even shared some old reference photos from the time of the experiment. This was a novelty for me, as my comics are usually about long-dead historical figures!

Bruce came across as a generous person, as he obligingly answered my questions about the experiments. His patience in answering my many questions no doubt made Rat Park a better, more accurate comic.

Though they were conducted over 30 years ago, it is clear that Bruce is still proud of the Rat Park experiments. Having said that, I was pleased whenever he pulled me up for overstepping the limits of the original findings. As Bruce put it, “We live in a world of hype and it is important not to get drawn into it. Our strongest weapon is the literal truth.”

It is clear that scientific accuracy is important to Bruce, and that he is not simply promoting Rat Park for personal glory. He recognises that the Rat Park experiments do not necessarily ‘prove’ anything regarding human drug addictions. After all, rats are rats, and people are people. Yet he sees the findings of Rat Park as consistent with his larger body of research into human addictions, which he assembled in his book The Globalization of Addiction.

Carry me back: preparing for Rat Park

The Rat Park researchers were originally united in their view that the 1950s/60s experiments had design flaws which undermined their usefulness as ‘proof’ for addictive drugs. However, the team was divided with predictions about what would happen to the colony rats if given free access to opiates. Would the Rat Park rats avoid or embrace the drugs? Four years of laboratory work laid ahead until the researchers would know the answer.

Although Rat Park’s research was conducted with morphine, Bruce mentioned that this was not the original plan. Heroin is a prodrug (precursor) to morphine: it is converted into morphine by the body’s metabolism. Despite this direct connection between heroin and morphine, the researchers wanted to conduct the Rat Park experiments using actual heroin: for the symbolic impact-factor associated with researching this well-known street drug.

Unfortunately, there were too many bureaucratic hurdles involved for the university to purchase heroin for the experiments (despite the drug being freely bought and sold on Vancouver streets!) The researchers instead used morphine, buying a quantity of the drug from the federal health department, which they kept in a Bank of Nova Scotia safety deposit box on Simon Fraser University’s campus. This security meant that the drug cache with a street value of CAD$262,500 (about a thousand times higher than the actual price the university paid for it) thankfully never fell into the wrong hands!

What the neighbours say: the Rat Park enclosure

An essential part of my research was learning exactly what the Rat Park apparatus and research room looked like. The original papers only mentioned the total area of the enclosure (8.8m²), not the exact dimensions, or where the cage racks were located. I also was curious about what the room looked like: did it have windows? How much space was left around the outside of Rat Park for the researchers to walk?

Thankfully, Bruce Alexander has some photos of the Rat Park apparatus on his website. When I got in touch with Bruce, he was able to send me a handful of additional reference photos. Some of these photos are used in this blog post. Film-maker Jen Di Cresce was also able to help with some scanned 1980s newspaper articles about Rat Park (see below).

When researching her book Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychology Experiments of the Twentieth Century (2005) Lauren Slater had the opportunity to see the plywood pieces of the original Rat Park enclosure – which Bruce Alexander had kept in storage. She described it thus:

“…Alexander, Coambs and Hadaway painted the walls of the rats’ Ritz Carlton in jeweled greens and saffrons. They painted deciduous trees, mountains ribboned with roads and studded with tiny trees, creeks flowing over smooth stones. They cared little for the actual environmental accuracy of the backdrop. Jungles gave way to evergreens, snow melted into sand.”

This paintwork was mostly done for the benefit of the researchers, rather than the rats. Painting Rat Park with happy colours gave the team something nice to look at during the long hours they would spend inside the room over the next four years. For the rats’ enjoyment, all sorts of desiderata were placed on the fragrant cedar wood-shavings inside Rat Park. Tin cans, balls and running wheels were all added to stimulate the rats’ natural curiosity.

On the other side of the room, the caged rats were provided with food, water, and the option of taking drugs.

At one stage I imagined the Rat Park enclosure to be an enormous construction, with the photos on Bruce’s website only showing a small ‘wing’ of the sprawling master structure. I emailed Bruce and asked him to double-check the 8.8m² figure listed in his 1978 Psychopharmacology paper. He promised he’d go and revisit the original experiment room the next time he was on campus at Simon Fraser University.

Then it occurred to me: an area of 8.8m² does not mean a square box with all sides 8.8 metres long. It means a box with one dimension 8.8 metres long, and the other dimension 1 metre long. Facepalm! Suddenly the area figure and photograph reconciled in my head.

So Rat Park was an L-shaped enclosure with a total area of 8.8m², and the cage racks in the ‘crotch’ of the L. I am not sure if the rats in the cages were able to look down into Rat Park, or if that was prevented by some sort of screen. Anyway, for artistic effect, I made the wire mesh cages unobstructed on the side facing Rat Park.

They choose the path where no-one goes: the Rat Park team

Unfortunately only two of the Rat Park team were still alive when I was researching the comic. Well-known Canadian psychologist and sceptic Barry Beyerstein died of a heart attack in 2007. Patricia Hadaway had died of stomach cancer in the few years prior to that.

Still alive were Robert Coambs (who I could not get a hold of) and Bruce Alexander. Bruce is not much of a photograph-hoarder, so was only able to provide me with limited pictures of the team at the time of the experiments. However, he was able to supply written descriptions of the appearance of his colleagues.

Hopefully the team would all appreciate the cartoony way I paid tribute to their research in my comic. I am sure my comic, and other recent adaptations, will introduce their research to a new generation of readers.

To see the rest of this article, which goes into how the actual experiments were conducted, see: How Stuart McMillen researched Rat Park for his long-form comic.

To see some statistics on the U. S. prison population which might be benefically affected by a revision of drug laws, please visit the next page.