Attribution: Photo by Ralfh, Morguefile.com

In studying addiction, Professor Bruce K. Alexander replaced the Skinner Box with Rat Park.

When I was an experimental psychologist, between about 1960 and 1980, white laboratory rats had to live in solitary confinement cellblocks like this… Although the rats lived in close proximity, they could neither see nor touch each other, because the sides of their cages were made of sheet metal. The only visual stimulation they got was seeing the people who brought food and water and cleaned the metal pans under their cages every few days.

Unlike human prisoners, the rats did not even get an exercise period outside their cramped cages. And that was in the best of times. In the worst of times they were starved for 24 hours or more and put into Skinner Boxes that looked like this… (see link below for images).

Inside Skinner Boxes, the rats could get tiny pellets of food one at a time, provided they pushed a little lever on the side of the box over and over and over. The metal floor made it possible for the experiment to administer electric shocks when the experiment was about punishment rather than reward, which it often was. Do you think that this would qualify as psychological abuse of rats? Of course it would, if there were such a crime.

But we young psychologists were trained not to think about what the rats might be experiencing. We usually did not even look at the rats, but only at the data they produced in the Skinner Boxes by pressing their little levers. The data looked like this… (undecipherable graph). . . Do you see any sign of rat angst or depression in these data? If not, the rats must be ok, right?

In the 1960s, some experimental psychologists began to think that the Skinner Box was a good place to study drug addiction. They perfected techniques that allowed the rats to inject small doses of a drug into themselves by pressing the lever. This required tethering the rat to the ceiling of the box with tubing and surgically implanting a needle, or catheter, into their jugular veins. The drug passed through the tube and the needle into the rats’ bloodstreams almost instantaneously when they pushed the lever. It reached their brains moments later. Under appropriate conditions, rats would press the lever often enough to consume large amounts of heroin, morphine, amphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs in this situation.

The mass media of the day were quite excited about these experiments. The results seemed to prove that these drugs were irresistibly addicting, even to rodents, and by extension, to human beings. The conclusion that illegal drugs are irresistibly addicting fit well with the fearsome images that were being propagated about them. The rat research provided additional support for the War on Drugs of that day. Irresistibly addicting drugs certainly cannot be allowed to circulate in human society, especially if, as we were told, this is your brain on drugs… (image of a fried egg)

At first, the conclusion that was reached from this rat research made sense to me. But then I began to realize that it was a stretch. Actually, it was more than a stretch; it was a bone-cracking, joint-popping contortion of normal reason, for several reasons.

To read the remainder of this article, see View from Rat Park.

Professor Alexander thus views drug addiction as not predatory, and treatable with a healing environment.

Why, then, have we pursued drug users as enemies in our war on drugs?

B. F. Skinner’s works are often referenced in treatises on crime and punishment. To see the simple explanation of Skinner as to the futility of punishment, visit the next page.