by Johann Hari
Bruce often invited addicts from the Downtown Eastside to come to address his students, and one day an addict explained his life story and then took questions from them.
“Our professor,” one of the class members asked, “has said withdrawal symptoms are not really bad at all. They’re really not like the way they’re depicted in the media and in films. Is that true?”
“Well, he says they’re not very serious,5 eh?” the addict replied. “Says they don’t make you crawl on the wall and climb up by your fingernails? . . . Well, I wonder if you’ve noticed that I’m in withdrawal right now.”
He was. He was a little bit sniffly6 and sweaty. That’s all.
The medical researchers7 John Ball and Carl Chambers studied the medical literature between 1875 and 1968 and found that nobody had died of heroin withdrawal alone in that time. The only people who can be killed by withdrawal, it turns out, are people who are already very weak: withdrawal helped to kill Billie Holiday when she was terribly sick with liver disease, for example, in the same way that ordinary flu can kill a ninety-five-year-old.
In another class, when Bruce was making his point that chemicals can’t be the primary cause of addiction, a student raised his hand.
“This is bullshit,” he said, “because we know why people take heroin. They take heroin because it captures their brain once they’ve taken it . . . and the proof is these rat studies which show that’s true.”
As I said earlier, the strongest evidence for the pharmaceutical theory of addiction had, for years, been a series of experiments on rats.8 A famous advertisement that ran on U.S. TV in the 1980s, paid for by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, explained it best. It shows a rat in close-up licking at a water bottle, as the narrator says: “Only one drug is so addictive,9 nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.” The rat runs about manically, then—as promised by the scary music—drops dead. Similar rat experiments had been run to prove the addictiveness of heroin and other drugs.
But when Bruce looked at these experiments, he noticed something. These rats had been put in an empty cage. They were all alone, with no toys, and no activities, and no friends. There was nothing for them to do but to take the drug.
What, he wondered, if10 the experiment was run differently? With a few of his colleagues, he built two sets of homes for laboratory rats. In the first home, they lived as they had in the original experiments, in solitary confinement, isolated except for their fix. But then he built a second home: a paradise for rats. Within its plywood walls,11 it contained everything a rat could want—there were wheels and colored balls and the best food, and other rats to hang out with and have sex with.
He called it Rat Park.12 In these experiments, both sets of rats had access to a pair of drinking bottles. The first bottle contained only water. The other bottle contained morphine—an opiate that rats process in a similar way to humans and that behaves just like heroin when it enters their brains. At the end of each day, Bruce or a member of his team would weigh the bottles to see how much the rats had chosen to take opiates, and how much they had chosen to stay sober.
What they discovered was startling. It turned out that the rats in isolated cages used up to 25 milligrams of morphine a day, as in the earlier experiments. But the rats in the happy cages used hardly any morphine at all—less than 5 milligrams. “These guys [in Rat Park] have a complete total twenty-four-hour supply” of morphine, Bruce said, “and they don’t use it.” They don’t kill themselves. They choose to spend their lives doing other things.
So the old experiments were, it seemed, wrong. It isn’t the drug that causes the harmful behavior—it’s the environment. An isolated rat will almost always become a junkie. A rat with a good life almost never will, no matter how many drugs you make available to him. As Bruce put it: he was realizing that addiction isn’t a disease. Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you—it’s the cage you live in.
Bruce and his colleagues kept tweaking the experiment, to see just how much your environment shapes your chemical compulsions.
He took a set of rats13 and made them drink the morphine solution for fifty-seven days, in their cage, alone. If drugs can hijack your brain, that will definitely do it. Then he put these junkies into Rat Park. Would they carry on using compulsively, even when their environment improved? Had the drug taken them over?
In Rat Park, the junkie rats seemed to have some twitches of withdrawal—but quite quickly, they stopped drinking the morphine. A happy social environment, it seemed, freed them of their addiction. In Rat Park, Bruce writes, “nothing that we tried14 instilled a strong appetite for morphine or produced anything that looked to us like addiction.”
Bruce naturally wanted to know if this applied to humans. Oddly enough, a large-scale human experiment along similar lines was being carried out shortly before. It was called the Vietnam War.
Out in Southeast Asia,15 using heroin was “as common as chewing gum” among U.S. soldiers, as Time magazine reported at the time. This wasn’t just journalistic hyperbole:16 some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry later cited by many writers. This meant there were more17 heroin addicts serving in the U.S. Army than there were back home in the United States. The American military had cracked down18 hard on marijuana smoking among its troops, sending in pot-sniffing dogs and staging mass arrests, and so huge numbers of men—unable to face that level of pressure without a relaxant—had transferred to smack, which sniffer dogs can’t snuffle out. Senator Robert Steele19 of Connecticut came home from the jungles ashen-faced to explain: “The soldier going to South Vietnam today runs a far greater risk of becoming a heroin addict than a combat casualty.”
Many people in the United States were understandably terrified. The war was going to end sooner or later, and at that point the streets of America were going to swell with an unprecedented number of junkies. They believed the pharmaceutical theory of addiction—so this was the only outcome that made any sense. Their brains and bodies were being hijacked by the drug, so, as Senator Harold Hughes20 of Iowa warned: “Within a matter of months in our large cities, the Capone era of the ’20s may look like a Sunday school picnic by comparison.”
The war ended. The addicts came home. And something nobody expected took place. The study in the Archives of General Psychiatry—and21 the experiences people could see all across the country—show that 95 percent of them, within a year, simply stopped. The addicts who received drug treatment and rehab were no more likely to stop than those who received no treatment at all. A tiny number of vets did carry on shooting up. They turned out either to have22 had unstable childhoods, or to have been addicts before they went.
If you believe the theory that drugs hijack your brain and turn you into a chemical slave—the theory on which the war on drugs has been based since Anslinger—then this makes no sense. But there is another explanation. As the writer Dan Baum puts it: “Take a man out23 of a pestilential jungle where people he can’t see are trying to kill him for reasons he doesn’t understand, and—surprise!—his need to shoot smack goes away.”
After learning all this, Bruce was beginning to develop a theory—one that radically contradicted our earlier understanding of addiction but seemed to him the only way to explain all this evidence. If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.
As Bruce explains this to me, I find myself picturing the Hole back in Tent City in the Arizona desert. In order to punish addicts, the drug warriors have in fact built the very conditions that will be most likely to produce and deepen addiction.
So, Bruce believes, the gap between the 90 percent who use drugs without its ca
using a problem and the 10 percent who can’t isn’t set in concrete. It’s the product of social circumstances—and it can change as social circumstances change.
The rats in solitary confinement and the soldiers in Vietnam weren’t being “hijacked” by the chemicals at hand. They were trying to cope with being dislocated from everything that gave their lives meaning and pleasure. The world around them had become an unbearable place to be—so when they couldn’t get out of it physically, they decided to get out of it mentally. Later, when they could get back to a meaningful life, they felt no more need for the drugs, and they left them behind with surprising ease.
The key to understanding this hidden cause of addiction, Bruce came to believe, was found in one idea above all24 others—dislocation. Being cut off from meaning. He began to set out his ideas in an extraordinary book called The Globalization of Addiction.
He began to piece together why this would be. Human beings evolved in small bands of hunter-gatherers on the savannahs of Africa. The tribe was your only way to survive. If you feel that you have been stripped of a tribe and its rituals you will become deeply unhappy: a human on the savannah who was alone against the world would almost certainly have died. Humans seem to have evolved with a deep need to bond, because it was absolutely essential to staying alive.
Bruce began to look over the history of when addiction has suddenly soared among human beings—and he found it has, time and again, been when these bonds were taken away from people. The native peoples of North America were stripped of their land and their culture—and collapsed into mass alcoholism. The English poor were driven from the land into scary, scattered cities in the eighteenth century—and glugged their way into the Gin Craze.25 The American inner cities were stripped of their factory jobs and the communities surrounding them in the 1970s and 1980s—and a crack pipe was waiting at the end of the shut-down assembly line. The American rural heartlands saw their markets and subsidies wither in the 1980s and 1990s—and embarked on a meth binge.26
So Bruce came to believe, as he put it, that “today’s flood of addiction27 is occurring because our hyperindividualistic, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel social[ly] or culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for relief. They find temporary relief in addiction . . . because [it] allows them to escape their feelings, to deaden their senses—and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a substitute for a full life.”
This isn’t an argument against Gabor’s discoveries. It’s a deepening of them. A kid who is neglected or beaten or raped—like Chino’s mother, or Billie Holiday—finds it hard to trust people and to form healthy bonds with them, so they often become isolated, like the rats in solitary confinement, and with the same effects.
Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.”28 Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively.
One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.”
Rat Park seems to fill some of the holes in our understanding of addiction, but at first glance, it still leaves at least one. What about the heroin famines?
Miserable people will seek altered mental states to numb the pain. That much makes sense. But the heroin addicts Bruce was working with on the Downtown Eastside weren’t actually taking heroin during the period when the port of Vancouver was successfully blockaded. They weren’t altering their mental states in any physical sense—but they carried on with the junkie behavior, injecting empty powders into their arms. Why?
Bruce realizes that in all his months and years interviewing addicts about their lives, they had been telling him the answer all along. “People explained over and over before I got it,” Bruce tells me.
Before they became junkies, these young people were sitting in a room alone, cut off from meaning. Most of them could hope at best for a McJob with a shrinking minimum wage—a lifelong burger-flip punctuated by watching TV and scrimping for minor consumer objects. “My job was basically to say—why don’t you stop taking drugs?” Bruce says. “And one guy explained to me very beautifully. He said, ‘Well, think about that for a minute. What would I do if I stopped taking drugs? Maybe I could get myself a job as a janitor or something like that.’ ” Compare that, he said, to “what I’m doing right now, which is really exciting. Because I’ve got friends down here and we do exciting things like rob stores and hang around with hookers.” Suddenly you are part of a world where, together with other addicts, you are embarked on a crusade—a constant frenetic crusade to steal enough to buy the drugs, dodge the police, keep out of jail, and stay alive.
If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already.
The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.
This seemed odd and jarring when I first heard it. The life of a street addict is horrific. You can be culled at any moment by a bad batch, hypothermia, rape, the police. Like Bruce, I had to keep turning this theory over and over in my mind, and applying it to the addicts I knew, until I saw it.
Remember: when the actual heroin was gone, they carried on acting as heroin addicts. The horrifying fact is that, as Bruce puts it, “it’s a lot better to be a junkie than to be nothing at all, and that’s the alternative these guys face—being nothing at all.” So when the heroin was cut off, “They maintained the essence of their heroin addiction—which is a subculture addiction.” When you have been told you are a piece of shit all your life, embracing the identity of being a piece of shit, embracing the other pieces of shit, living openly as a piece of shit—it seems better than being alone.29
As one addict told Bruce: “This is a life. It’s better than no life.”
As I listened to Gabor and Bruce, I wanted to be persuaded—but part of me was skeptical. What is the opposite side of the argument here? This isn’t what I was taught at school. It is not what most of us believe. No matter how persuasive they seemed, there was still part of me that kept thinking—obviously it is the chemicals that cause addiction. It’s common sense.
The best man to provide a rebuttal, it seemed to me, was Robert DuPont. He is the founder of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which funds 90 percent of all the research into illegal drugs in the world. He is a highly distinguished scientist, and the man who created many of the metaphors that help us to understand drugs today. I tracked him down at the World Federation Against Drugs conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Over two days, I milled among antidrug activists from across the world. DuPont is a tall, thin, genial man from Ohio, and he delivered the knockout speech of the conference—an eloquent rallying call for the drug war, summing up a conference30 that warned that chemicals can hijack your brain and cause chemical slavery.
He agreed to let me put to him some of the possible holes in the theory, and as we spoke, he listened intently. I started by asking how many of the negative effects of drugs he believed are driven by their pharmacological component. He looked at me blankly. “As opposed to . . . ?” And
there was a silence.
I mentioned childhood trauma, and isolation. He continued to look blank. “I think the environment is really important,” he said—and then named only one environmental factor: whether drugs are legal or not. Drug use must be kept as a crime, or it will explode. I tried to press him on other factors, but this was the only one he would acknowledge.
I was a little thrown by this, and so I asked him a different question. The institute you set up says drugs make the addict into a chemical slave—that the chemicals take you over—but I am trying to figure out how that fits with the studies suggesting that most addicts simply stop. How is that slavery? Frederick Douglass didn’t just walk off the plantation one day. DuPont looked quizzical, and thought about this. “Your point is well taken—I’ve never thought about it quite this way. There’s an absolute quality to the slavery of two centuries ago. This,” he said, “is more of a nuanced slavery.”
We smiled at each other, a little awkwardly. What, I asked, about the other key metaphor promoted by the organization he founded—of a hijacking? Most hijackings don’t end with the hostages choosing to walk away from their captors. “Oh, yes,” he says. “It’s a question of partial hijacking. That’s a good point too.”
I felt a little baffled. These are the central metaphors on which the standard theory of addiction is built, and this was the most distinguished expert on the matter, speaking at a conference with these ideas at its very heart. But when I asked him the most basic questions about how this relates to the wider environment, he said—in a friendly way—that he’s never really thought about them. This is the man who set up the main center for drug research in the world, and it was plain he hadn’t actually heard of these alternative theories. He didn’t seem to know who Gabor or Bruce were, or what people like them have shown in their studies.