WEBVTT 00:00:00.643 --> 00:00:03.038 What causes, say, heroin addiction? 00:00:03.508 --> 00:00:05.644 This is a really stupid question, right? 00:00:05.994 --> 00:00:07.446 It’s obvious; we all know it; 00:00:07.446 --> 00:00:09.695 heroin causes heroin addiction. 00:00:10.225 --> 00:00:11.469 Here’s how it works: 00:00:11.469 --> 00:00:15.296 if you use heroin for 20 days, by day 21, 00:00:15.296 --> 00:00:17.904 your body would physically crave the drug ferociously 00:00:17.904 --> 00:00:19.989 because there are chemical hooks in the drug. 00:00:20.449 --> 00:00:21.876 That’s what addiction means. 00:00:22.416 --> 00:00:24.219 But there’s a catch. 00:00:24.699 --> 00:00:28.071 Almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong. 00:00:35.128 --> 00:00:38.518 If you, for example, break your hip, you’ll be taken to a hospital 00:00:38.518 --> 00:00:42.023 and you’ll be given loads of diamorphine for weeks or even months. 00:00:42.483 --> 00:00:44.236 Diamorphine is heroin. 00:00:44.896 --> 00:00:48.317 It’s, in fact, much stronger heroin than any addict can get on the street 00:00:48.317 --> 00:00:51.932 because it’s not contaminated by all the stuff drug dealers dilute it with. 00:00:52.582 --> 00:00:54.200 There are people near you being given 00:00:54.200 --> 00:00:56.981 loads of deluxe heroin in hospitals right now. 00:00:57.501 --> 00:00:59.502 So at least some of them should become addicts? 00:01:00.272 --> 00:01:03.411 But this has been closely studied; it doesn’t happen. 00:01:03.901 --> 00:01:07.401 Your grandmother wasn’t turned into a junkie by her hip replacement. 00:01:07.831 --> 00:01:08.654 Why is that? 00:01:09.394 --> 00:01:12.716 Our current theory of addiction comes in part from a series of experiments 00:01:12.716 --> 00:01:15.186 that were carried out earlier in the 20th century. 00:01:15.576 --> 00:01:16.773 The experiment is simple: 00:01:16.773 --> 00:01:20.274 you take a rat and put it in a cage with two water bottles. 00:01:20.814 --> 00:01:24.819 One is just water, the other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. 00:01:25.129 --> 00:01:27.128 Almost every time you run this experiment, 00:01:27.128 --> 00:01:29.509 the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water 00:01:29.509 --> 00:01:33.010 and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself. 00:01:33.800 --> 00:01:37.571 But in the 1970s, Bruce Alexander, a professor of psychology, 00:01:37.571 --> 00:01:39.952 noticed something odd about this experiment: 00:01:39.952 --> 00:01:42.357 the rat is put in the cage all alone. 00:01:42.957 --> 00:01:44.925 It has nothing to do but take the drugs. 00:01:45.535 --> 00:01:48.473 What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? 00:01:49.323 --> 00:01:53.071 So he built Rat Park, which is basically heaven for rats; 00:01:53.071 --> 00:01:57.021 it’s a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls, tunnels to scamper down, 00:01:57.021 --> 00:02:00.136 plenty of friends to play with, and they could have loads of sex— 00:02:00.136 --> 00:02:02.369 everything a rat about town could want. 00:02:02.779 --> 00:02:05.756 And they would have the drugged water and the normal water bottles. 00:02:06.426 --> 00:02:08.274 But here’s the fascinating thing: 00:02:08.274 --> 00:02:11.780 in Rat Park, rats hardly ever use the drugged water; 00:02:11.780 --> 00:02:15.820 none of them ever use it compulsively; none of them ever overdose. 00:02:16.550 --> 00:02:18.695 But maybe this is a quirk of rats, right? 00:02:19.155 --> 00:02:22.517 Well, helpfully, there was a human experiment along the same lines: 00:02:22.517 --> 00:02:23.801 the Vietnam War. 00:02:24.281 --> 00:02:27.768 20% of American troops in Vietnam were using a lot of heroin. 00:02:28.228 --> 00:02:29.862 People back home were really panicked, 00:02:29.862 --> 00:02:32.555 because they thought there would be hundreds of thousands of junkies 00:02:32.555 --> 00:02:35.149 on the streets of the United States when the war was over. 00:02:35.629 --> 00:02:39.234 But a study followed the soliders home and found something striking: 00:02:39.234 --> 00:02:42.603 they didn’t go to rehab; they didn’t even go into withdrawal; 00:02:42.603 --> 00:02:45.652 95% of them just stopped after they got home. 00:02:45.952 --> 00:02:49.564 If you believe the old theory of addiction, that makes no sense. 00:02:49.564 --> 00:02:53.095 But if you believe Prof. Alexander’s theory, it makes perfect sense, 00:02:53.095 --> 00:02:56.303 because if you’re put into a horrific jungle in a foreign country 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, 00:03:00.033 --> 00:03:02.748 doing heroin is a great way to spend your time; 00:03:02.748 --> 00:03:06.058 but if you go back to your nice home with your friends and your family, 00:03:06.058 --> 00:03:08.950 it’s the equivalent of being taken out of that first cage 00:03:08.950 --> 00:03:10.721 and put into a human Rat Park; 00:03:11.561 --> 00:03:13.999 it’s not the chemicals, it’s your cage. 00:03:14.539 --> 00:03:16.557 We need to think about addiction differently. 00:03:17.197 --> 00:03:20.031 Human beings have an innate need to bond and connect. 00:03:20.421 --> 00:03:23.655 When we are happy and healthy, we will bond with the people around us. 00:03:24.005 --> 00:03:25.000 But when we can’t, 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:28.267 because we’re traumatized, isolated, or beaten down by life, 00:03:28.267 --> 00:03:31.564 we will bond with something that gives us some sense of relief. 00:03:31.784 --> 00:03:34.029 It might be endlessly checking a smartphone; 00:03:34.029 --> 00:03:39.909 it might be pornography, video games, reddit, gambling, or it might be cocaine. 00:03:40.239 --> 00:03:43.686 But we will bond with something, because that is our human nature. 00:03:44.416 --> 00:03:47.765 The path out of unhealthy bonds is to form healthy bonds, 00:03:47.975 --> 00:03:50.535 to be connected to people you want to be present with. 00:03:51.265 --> 00:03:54.417 Addiction is just one symptom of the crisis of disconnection 00:03:54.417 --> 00:03:55.704 that’s happening all around us. 00:03:55.974 --> 00:03:56.918 We all feel it. 00:03:57.258 --> 00:04:01.085 Since the 1950s, the average number of close friends an American has 00:04:01.085 --> 00:04:02.711 has been steadily declining. 00:04:02.881 --> 00:04:05.841 At the same time, the amount of floor space in their homes 00:04:05.841 --> 00:04:07.419 has been steadily increasing. 00:04:07.749 --> 00:04:11.764 To choose floor space over friends, to choose stuff over connection. 00:04:12.584 --> 00:04:15.336 The War on Drugs we’ve been fighting for almost a century now 00:04:15.336 --> 00:04:16.985 has made everything worse. 00:04:17.395 --> 00:04:20.273 Instead of helping people heal and getting their life together, 00:04:20.273 --> 00:04:22.524 we have cast them out from society, 00:04:22.524 --> 00:04:25.655 we have made it harder for them to get jobs and become stable, 00:04:25.655 --> 00:04:29.166 we take benefits and support away from them if we catch them with drugs, 00:04:29.166 --> 00:04:32.604 we throw them in prison cells, which are literally cages, 00:04:32.604 --> 00:04:34.774 we put people who are not well 00:04:34.774 --> 00:04:39.020 in a situation which makes them feel worse and hate them for not recovering. 00:04:39.440 --> 00:04:43.355 For too long, we’ve talked only about individual recovery from addiction. 00:04:43.865 --> 00:04:46.309 But we need now to talk about social recovery. 00:04:46.459 --> 00:04:48.667 Because something has gone wrong with us as a group. 00:04:49.097 --> 00:04:52.579 We have to build a society that looks a lot more like Rat Park 00:04:52.579 --> 00:04:55.256 and a lot less like those isolated cages. 00:04:55.786 --> 00:04:58.852 We are going to have to change the unnatural way we live 00:04:58.852 --> 00:05:00.508 and rediscover each other. 00:05:01.178 --> 00:05:06.746 The opposite of addiction is not sobriety; the opposite of addiction is connection. 00:05:10.806 --> 00:05:13.152 This video is a collaboration with Johann Hari, 00:05:13.152 --> 00:05:14.108 the author of the book 00:05:14.108 --> 00:05:17.729 “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs”. 00:05:18.449 --> 00:05:21.664 He was very kind to work with us on this video to spread the word. 00:05:21.844 --> 00:05:23.711 We recommend that you give the book a try. 00:05:24.651 --> 00:05:27.672 Our videos are made thanks to your support on Patreon.com. 00:05:27.942 --> 00:05:31.690 If you want to help us make more of them, we really appreciate your support. 00:05:32.620 --> 00:05:35.746 We made an interactive version of this video together with some friends. 00:05:36.566 --> 00:05:37.921 See the link in the description.