1 00:00:00,643 --> 00:00:03,038 What causes, say, heroin addiction? 2 00:00:03,508 --> 00:00:05,644 This is a really stupid question, right? 3 00:00:05,994 --> 00:00:07,446 It’s obvious; we all know it; 4 00:00:07,446 --> 00:00:09,695 heroin causes heroin addiction. 5 00:00:10,225 --> 00:00:11,469 Here’s how it works: 6 00:00:11,469 --> 00:00:15,296 if you use heroin for 20 days, by day 21, 7 00:00:15,296 --> 00:00:17,904 your body would physically crave the drug ferociously 8 00:00:17,904 --> 00:00:19,989 because there are chemical hooks in the drug. 9 00:00:20,449 --> 00:00:21,876 That’s what addiction means. 10 00:00:22,416 --> 00:00:24,219 But there’s a catch. 11 00:00:24,699 --> 00:00:28,071 Almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong. 12 00:00:35,128 --> 00:00:38,518 If you, for example, break your hip, you’ll be taken to a hospital 13 00:00:38,518 --> 00:00:42,023 and you’ll be given loads of diamorphine for weeks or even months. 14 00:00:42,483 --> 00:00:44,236 Diamorphine is heroin. 15 00:00:44,896 --> 00:00:48,317 It’s, in fact, much stronger heroin than any addict can get on the street 16 00:00:48,317 --> 00:00:51,932 because it’s not contaminated by all the stuff drug dealers dilute it with. 17 00:00:52,582 --> 00:00:54,200 There are people near you being given 18 00:00:54,200 --> 00:00:56,981 loads of deluxe heroin in hospitals right now. 19 00:00:57,501 --> 00:00:59,502 So at least some of them should become addicts? 20 00:01:00,272 --> 00:01:03,411 But this has been closely studied; it doesn’t happen. 21 00:01:03,901 --> 00:01:07,401 Your grandmother wasn’t turned into a junkie by her hip replacement. 22 00:01:07,831 --> 00:01:08,654 Why is that? 23 00:01:09,394 --> 00:01:12,716 Our current theory of addiction comes in part from a series of experiments 24 00:01:12,716 --> 00:01:15,186 that were carried out earlier in the 20th century. 25 00:01:15,576 --> 00:01:16,773 The experiment is simple: 26 00:01:16,773 --> 00:01:20,274 you take a rat and put it in a cage with two water bottles. 27 00:01:20,814 --> 00:01:24,819 One is just water, the other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. 28 00:01:25,129 --> 00:01:27,128 Almost every time you run this experiment, 29 00:01:27,128 --> 00:01:29,509 the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water 30 00:01:29,509 --> 00:01:33,010 and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself. 31 00:01:33,800 --> 00:01:37,571 But in the 1970s, Bruce Alexander, a professor of psychology, 32 00:01:37,571 --> 00:01:39,952 noticed something odd about this experiment: 33 00:01:39,952 --> 00:01:42,357 the rat is put in the cage all alone. 34 00:01:42,957 --> 00:01:44,925 It has nothing to do but take the drugs. 35 00:01:45,535 --> 00:01:48,473 What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? 36 00:01:49,323 --> 00:01:53,071 So he built Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats; 37 00:01:53,071 --> 00:01:57,021 it’s a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls, tunnels to scamper down, 38 00:01:57,021 --> 00:02:00,136 plenty of friends to play with, and they could have loads of sex— 39 00:02:00,136 --> 00:02:02,369 everything a rat about town could want. 40 00:02:02,779 --> 00:02:05,756 And they would have the drugged water and the normal water bottles. 41 00:02:06,426 --> 00:02:08,274 But here’s the fascinating thing: 42 00:02:08,274 --> 00:02:11,780 in Rat Park, rats hardly ever use the drugged water; 43 00:02:11,780 --> 00:02:15,820 none of them ever use it compulsively; none of them ever overdose. 44 00:02:16,550 --> 00:02:18,695 But maybe this is a quirk of rats, right? 45 00:02:19,155 --> 00:02:22,517 Well, helpfully, there was a human experiment along the same lines: 46 00:02:22,517 --> 00:02:23,801 the Vietnam War. 47 00:02:24,281 --> 00:02:27,768 20% of American troops in Vietnam were using a lot of heroin. 48 00:02:28,228 --> 00:02:29,862 People back home were really panicked, 49 00:02:29,862 --> 00:02:32,555 because they thought there would be hundreds of thousands of junkies 50 00:02:32,555 --> 00:02:35,149 on the streets of the United States when the war was over. 51 00:02:35,629 --> 00:02:39,234 But a study followed the soliders home and found something striking: 52 00:02:39,234 --> 00:02:42,603 they didn’t go to rehab; they didn’t even go into withdrawal; 53 00:02:42,603 --> 00:02:45,652 95% of them just stopped after they got home. 54 00:02:45,952 --> 00:02:49,564 If you believe the old theory of addiction, that makes no sense. 55 00:02:49,564 --> 00:02:53,095 But if you believe Prof. Alexander’s theory, it makes perfect sense, 56 00:02:53,095 --> 00:02:56,303 because if you’re put into a horrific jungle in a foreign country 57 00:02:56,303 --> 00:03:00,033 where you don’t want to be, and you could be forced to kill or die at any moment, 58 00:03:00,033 --> 00:03:02,748 doing heroin is a great way to spend your time; 59 00:03:02,748 --> 00:03:06,058 but if you go back to your nice home with your friends and your family, 60 00:03:06,058 --> 00:03:08,950 it’s the equivalent of being taken out of that first cage 61 00:03:08,950 --> 00:03:10,721 and put into a human Rat Park; 62 00:03:11,561 --> 00:03:13,999 it’s not the chemicals, it’s your cage. 63 00:03:14,539 --> 00:03:16,557 We need to think about addiction differently. 64 00:03:17,197 --> 00:03:20,031 Human beings have an innate need to bond and connect. 65 00:03:20,421 --> 00:03:23,655 When we are happy and healthy, we will bond with the people around us. 66 00:03:24,005 --> 00:03:25,000 But when we can’t, 67 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:28,267 because we’re traumatized, isolated, or beaten down by life, 68 00:03:28,267 --> 00:03:31,564 we will bond with something that gives us some sense of relief. 69 00:03:31,784 --> 00:03:34,029 It might be endlessly checking a smartphone; 70 00:03:34,029 --> 00:03:39,909 it might be pornography, video games, reddit, gambling, or it might be cocaine. 71 00:03:40,239 --> 00:03:43,686 But we will bond with something, because that is our human nature. 72 00:03:44,416 --> 00:03:47,765 The path out of unhealthy bonds is to form healthy bonds, 73 00:03:47,975 --> 00:03:50,535 to be connected to people you want to be present with. 74 00:03:51,265 --> 00:03:54,417 Addiction is just one symptom of the crisis of disconnection 75 00:03:54,417 --> 00:03:55,704 that’s happening all around us. 76 00:03:55,974 --> 00:03:56,918 We all feel it. 77 00:03:57,258 --> 00:04:01,085 Since the 1950s, the average number of close friends an American has 78 00:04:01,085 --> 00:04:02,711 has been steadily declining. 79 00:04:02,881 --> 00:04:05,841 At the same time, the amount of floor space in their homes 80 00:04:05,841 --> 00:04:07,419 has been steadily increasing. 81 00:04:07,749 --> 00:04:11,764 To choose floor space over friends, to choose stuff over connection. 82 00:04:12,584 --> 00:04:15,336 The War on Drugs we’ve been fighting for almost a century now 83 00:04:15,336 --> 00:04:16,985 has made everything worse. 84 00:04:17,395 --> 00:04:20,273 Instead of helping people heal and getting their life together, 85 00:04:20,273 --> 00:04:22,524 we have cast them out from society, 86 00:04:22,524 --> 00:04:25,655 we have made it harder for them to get jobs and become stable, 87 00:04:25,655 --> 00:04:29,166 we take benefits and support away from them if we catch them with drugs, 88 00:04:29,166 --> 00:04:32,604 we throw them in prison cells, which are literally cages, 89 00:04:32,604 --> 00:04:34,774 we put people who are not well 90 00:04:34,774 --> 00:04:39,020 in a situation which makes them feel worse and hate them for not recovering. 91 00:04:39,440 --> 00:04:43,355 For too long, we’ve talked only about individual recovery from addiction. 92 00:04:43,865 --> 00:04:46,309 But we need now to talk about social recovery. 93 00:04:46,459 --> 00:04:48,667 Because something has gone wrong with us as a group. 94 00:04:49,097 --> 00:04:52,579 We have to build a society that looks a lot more like Rat Park 95 00:04:52,579 --> 00:04:55,256 and a lot less like those isolated cages. 96 00:04:55,786 --> 00:04:58,852 We are going to have to change the unnatural way we live 97 00:04:58,852 --> 00:05:00,508 and rediscover each other. 98 00:05:01,178 --> 00:05:06,746 The opposite of addiction is not sobriety; the opposite of addiction is connection. 99 00:05:10,806 --> 00:05:13,152 This video is a collaboration with Johann Hari, 100 00:05:13,152 --> 00:05:14,108 the author of the book 101 00:05:14,108 --> 00:05:17,729 “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs”. 102 00:05:18,449 --> 00:05:21,664 He was very kind to work with us on this video to spread the word. 103 00:05:21,844 --> 00:05:23,711 We recommend that you give the book a try. 104 00:05:24,651 --> 00:05:27,672 Our videos are made thanks to your support on Patreon.com. 105 00:05:27,942 --> 00:05:31,690 If you want to help us make more of them, we really appreciate your support. 106 00:05:32,620 --> 00:05:35,746 We made an interactive version of this video together with some friends. 107 00:05:36,566 --> 00:05:37,921 See the link in the description.