#rat study

RAT

2018 Art Challenge Day 44 Animals

We as a society have come a long way in our discussions and treatments of addiction. Despite this, I think we still have a ways to go.

First, I think it is a problem that people still see only some manifestations of addiction as legitimate, and others as not. For example, some people believe that gambling can be a real addiction but shopping cannot be. Additionally, some people believe that only some drugs (like meth and heroin, for example) are addicting while other drugs - especially FDA approved prescription drugs - are not (like prednisone, which is used to treat asthma and other inflammatory disorders), However, we know that there is a potential fo addiction in any behavior or drug that we introduce to our bodies that elicits a positive experience, because it’s not the object that matters but the response. As long as the thing we do or the object we ingest elicits in us a positive physiological reaction, particularly when it comes to the neurotransmitters it causes to fire in our brains, we’re going to want to do it again. And again, and again, whenever we are presented with the opportunity.

People tend to think of addiction allegorically to the early rat studies of the effects of cocaine. At first, doctors would hand feed the rats the drug so they could control the intake and be able to study the results. Then, the rats were given unlimited access to the drug - and many, pretty quickly, killed themselves by overdose. However, later, researchers realized that those rats had nothing other to do than sip out of a drugged water bottle all day. They were just lonely, bored rats in a cage who could choose between normal water or drugs. So they didn’t necessarily prove just how addictive drugs can be, they just proved that drugs are preferable to water and nothingness.

So they attempted a new experiment. This time, they had a control group of understimulated rats, and they had another group of rats that inhabited what became known as the “Rat Park” where they had access to all of the things that would give them a fulfilling rat life.They could run around, play, mate, hide, and socialize with other rats. In both groups, the rats hat the option of drinking morphine.The rats in the rat park drank substantially less morphine. This means that it’s not just the properties of the substance itself that make it addicting, but it goes deeper than that. This becomes a nature/nurture debate, and I think at this point we all know that the two are intertwined.