Everything We Think We Know About Addiction Is Wrong

What causes, say, heroin addiction?

This is a really stupid question, right?

It’s obvious; we all know it;

heroin causes heroin addiction.

Here’s how it works:

if you use heroin for 20 days, by day 21,

your body would physically
crave the drug ferociously

because there are
chemical hooks in the drug.

That’s what addiction means.

But there’s a catch.

Almost everything we think
we know about addiction is wrong.

If you, for example, break your hip,
you’ll be taken to a hospital

and you’ll be given loads of diamorphine
for weeks or even months.

Diamorphine is heroin.

It’s, in fact, much stronger heroin than
any addict can get on the street

because it’s not contaminated by all
the stuff drug dealers dilute it with.

There are people near you being given

loads of deluxe heroin
in hospitals right now.

So at least some of them
should become addicts?

But this has been closely
studied; it doesn’t happen.

Your grandmother wasn’t turned into
a junkie by her hip replacement.

Why is that?

Our current theory of addiction comes in
part from a series of experiments

that were carried out earlier
in the 20th century.

The experiment is simple:

you take a rat and put it in a
cage with two water bottles.

One is just water, the other is water
laced with heroin or cocaine.

Almost every time you run this experiment,

the rat will become obsessed
with the drugged water

and keep coming back for
more and more, until it kills itself.

But in the 1970s, Bruce Alexander,
a professor of psychology,

noticed something odd
about this experiment:

the rat is put in the cage all alone.

It has nothing to do but take the drugs.

What would happen, he wondered,
if we tried this differently?

So he built Rat Park, which is
basically heaven for rats;

it’s a lush cage where the rats would have
colored balls, tunnels to scamper down,

plenty of friends to play with,
and they could have loads of sex—

everything a rat about town could want.

And they would have the drugged water
and the normal water bottles.

But here’s the fascinating thing:

in Rat Park, rats hardly
ever use the drugged water;

none of them ever use it compulsively;
none of them ever overdose.

But maybe this is a quirk of rats, right?

Well, helpfully, there was a human
experiment along the same lines:

the Vietnam War.

20% of American troops in Vietnam
were using a lot of heroin.

People back home were really panicked,

because they thought there would be
hundreds of thousands of junkies

on the streets of the United States
when the war was over.

But a study followed the soliders home
and found something striking:

they didn’t go to rehab; they didn’t
even go into withdrawal;

95% of them just stopped
after they got home.

If you believe the old theory of
addiction, that makes no sense.

But if you believe Prof. Alexander’s
theory, it makes perfect sense,

because if you’re put into a horrific
jungle in a foreign country

where you don’t want to be, and you could
be forced to kill or die at any moment,

doing heroin is a great way
to spend your time;

but if you go back to your nice
home with your friends and your family,

it’s the equivalent of being
taken out of that first cage

and put into a human Rat Park;

it’s not the chemicals, it’s your cage.

We need to think about
addiction differently.

Human beings have an innate
need to bond and connect.

When we are happy and healthy, we will
bond with the people around us.

But when we can’t,

because we’re traumatized, isolated,
or beaten down by life,

we will bond with something
that gives us some sense of relief.

It might be endlessly
checking a smartphone;

it might be pornography, video games,
reddit, gambling, or it might be cocaine.

But we will bond with something,
because that is our human nature.

The path out of unhealthy
bonds is to form healthy bonds,

to be connected to people
you want to be present with.

Addiction is just one symptom of
the crisis of disconnection

that’s happening all around us.

We all feel it.

Since the 1950s, the average number of
close friends an American has

has been steadily declining.

At the same time, the amount of
floor space in their homes

has been steadily increasing.

To choose floor space over friends,
to choose stuff over connection.

The War on Drugs we’ve been
fighting for almost a century now

has made everything worse.

Instead of helping people heal
and getting their life together,

we have cast them out from society,

we have made it harder for them
to get jobs and become stable,

we take benefits and support away from
them if we catch them with drugs,

we throw them in prison cells,
which are literally cages,

we put people who are not well

in a situation which makes them feel worse
and hate them for not recovering.

For too long, we’ve talked only about
individual recovery from addiction.

But we need now to
talk about social recovery.

Because something has gone
wrong with us as a group.

We have to build a society that
looks a lot more like Rat Park

and a lot less like those isolated cages.

We are going to have to change
the unnatural way we live

and rediscover each other.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety;
the opposite of addiction is connection.

This video is a collaboration
with Johann Hari,

the author of the book

“Chasing the Scream: The First and Last
Days of the War on Drugs”.

He was very kind to work with us
on this video to spread the word.

We recommend that you give the book a try.

Our videos are made thanks
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If you want to help us make more of them,
we really appreciate your support.

We made an interactive version of this
video together with some friends.

See the link in the description.