But still the research failed to gain widespread attention. Worse, when it was paid notice, it was usually in the form of open hostility. Narcotics as an irresistible plague on society remained the dominant narrative.
In 1984, an inspector paid a visit to Rat Park. He decided the facility did not have sufficient ventilation to provide for the rats on which Alexander was experimenting. “Rat Park was closed down,” Alexander laments. The room was reconfigured and shortly after opened as a counselling centre for students. “With the same ventilation system,” Alexander notes.
The natural next step was to conduct a similar experiment with humans and attempt to test whether the environment theory of addiction held in the more complex minds and bodies of homo sapiens. Of course, recreating the sort of conditions for people that the rats had endured wasn’t possible. The researchers could not confine humans in a monitored paradise where they had access to all the opiates they could ever desire. And they certainly could not sequester other humans in solitary confinement with a powerful drug as their only way to make the experience less torturous.
“We tried a number of cheesy experiments in which we tried to set up role-playing situations. And then we would ask people, ‘Do you feel like taking drugs now?’” Alexander recalls. “They didn’t go anywhere.”
Next, Alexander went looking for real-world examples. “Natural experiments had already occurred with people,” he recalls discovering. “We didn’t need to set up experiments. What we needed to do was read history in a very, very careful way. And the primary history that I read and that, for a while, I was totally immersed in, was a history of Native people in British Columbia.”
More than 10,000 years ago, Indigenous people populated what today we call British Columbia. They lived there in prosperity until the 1800s, when British traders began to arrive in substantial numbers. For the next 150 years, the Indigenous populations of BC were oppressed by settler-colonial violence. They were confined to small reserves, and their children were taken from them and forced to attend residential schools that forbade them to speak their languages and practice their customs.
Throughout the 1980s, Alexander travelled to many reserves and interviewed the First Nations people who lived there. “We went around questioning elders and looking at the historical records of the old anthropologists in British Columbia and the missionaries and so forth,” he says. “What we found is that there is very little indication there was anything like addiction prior to the cultures being destroyed and people being forced onto reserves.” After colonization, addictions, primarily to alcohol but also to other drugs, spread on reserves with the ferocity of smallpox outbreaks.
“Their culture had been completely broken down,” Alexander says. “Their traditional ties to the land and the sea and nature and everything else had been destroyed, and they had been put into these little reserves. They weren’t in solitary confinement or cages, but they were so far from a natural situation for those people that it seems it was close enough. And when you do that experiment, which has been done all over the world, not as an experiment but as colonization, then you find that the results are consistent.”
He recalls a visit he made to Fort Ware, a remote First Nations community in northern British Columbia. Before colonial settlers dammed the Peace River, creating Bennett Lake, the people of Fort Ware lived in a river valley there.
“They lived by hunting moose,” Alexander says. “All of their tribal territory and all of their history is under water now. They were devastated. And now it is one of these places where you can say there is 100-percent alcoholism. That is one of the places where I asked, ‘Tell me about addiction before you guys were colonized.’” No answer ever came. “That natural experiment is as good an experiment as any you could ever design,” Alexander says.
He found a second example in another population as different from the Indigenous people of BC as one could imagine.
In June 1971, US President Richard Nixon’s drug czar, Dr Jerome Jaffe, travelled to Vietnam to assess concerns about heroin becoming a problem among young American soldiers who were fighting there. The doctor established a urine-screening program and then returned with his data to the US, where he enlisted the help of Lee Robins, a professor of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine.
The men analyzed the data, and the results were terrifying. Nearly forty percent of all American serviceman stationed in Vietnam for whom they had obtained urine samples tested positive for opium.19 In follow-up interviews, Jaffe and Robins found twenty percent of soldiers reported physical withdrawal symptoms associated with opiates. Eleven percent of the soldiers tested positive for opium or heroin in a urine test administered upon their departure from Vietnam. Because the soldiers knew about the test before taking it, Robins later wrote, it stood to reason that eleven percent was addicted to an extent that they could not stop consuming the drug. Using the eleven-percent figure to calculate the scale of the problem that was being transported back to the United States, Jaffe and Robins warned the White House that there were 1,400 men with full-blown heroin addictions flying from Vietnam to their homes across America each month.
“President Richard Nixon himself announced that the country was in for an incredible disaster because these hordes of addicts were about to return to the United States,” Alexander remembers. “This was going to be an overwhelming wave of addiction. But it never happened.”
Jaffe and Robins conducted follow-up visits with the veterans who returned addicted, expecting the worst. But what they found was that of those soldiers who returned to America addicted to heroin—some 16,800 men each year as the war began to wind down—only five percent were still using heroin one year after they had left Vietnam. Continuing to follow a sample of the men, they next learned that just two percent entered treatment for an addiction and only about a third even attended a short detox program. Fifty percent of this group did use drugs again. The veterans had access to hard drugs and lacked treatment options, yet only a tiny minority remained addicted.
“This surprising rate of recovery, even when re-exposed to narcotic drugs, ran counter to the conventional wisdom that heroin is a drug which causes addicts to suffer intolerable craving that rapidly leads to re-addiction if re-exposed to the drug,” the paper concludes.
The reaction to Jaffe and Robins’s study of the Vietnam veterans—like the response to Alexander’s Rat Park study—was one of borderline hostility. “The press and the research community were … skeptical,” Robins wrote.20 “They resisted giving up the belief that heroin was a uniquely dangerous drug, to which a user became addicted very quickly, and addiction to which was virtually incurable.”
Bruce Alexander’s reaction was the opposite. He was fascinated and found that the results of the Vietnam studies strongly reinforced those of his own experiments with narcotics.
“Their addiction was very much environmentally determined,” Alexander says today. The men—barely more than boys, in most cases—were taken from their families and dropped into the jungles of Vietnam. They lived in terrible conditions, sleeping in rain that could last for weeks on end, in constant fear of attack and death. They experienced violence and watched their friends die in gruesome ways. They were on the wrong side of history, aware that their cause was one that many of their peers did not believe in. “So the addiction rate went way up,” Alexander says. “But it didn’t remain up when they got back to the relative comfort of being state-side.” The term that Alexander eventually applied to this phenomenon is “dislocation.”
“People need to have a place in their community, in their family, in their world, and in their supernatural world,” he says. “They have to feel connected on all these levels. And when they are not, they have to find something which connects them, something which engages them. And it turns out that drug addiction is a wonderfully engaging thing.”
How this problem manifests itself in great numbers of human lives was best explained to Alexander by an elde
r Indigenous woman—a grandmother, he recalls—whom he met on one of his trips to BC’s remote communities in the 1980s.
She described herself as sitting on the bank of a raging river that cuts through the mountains. “We see a head out there, bobbing up and down,” the woman told him. “We know somebody is drowning. So we swim out. And we know how to swim out there because the elders have told us where the rocks are. We go around the rocks. We don’t crash on the rocks. And we get the person. We grab them by the scruff of the neck, we drag them back through the water and, with the last of our energy, we throw them up on the bank.
“Sometimes they get up, and they walk back onto the land and all is well. They return to the people. And sometimes they stand up on the slippery bank and they slip right back in. They go back in the water and over the falls, and they are gone.
“When we do that, when we drag someone back, even if they don’t make it up the bank and back to the land, we feel like we are warriors. We feel like we are powerful and strong. Until we realize that some son of a bitch upstream is throwing more and more people into the river every year.”
The old woman never named the force that was throwing her people into the river. But to Alexander, it was obvious. “It’s a hostile society,” he says. “A society which is hostile to community and hostile to human well-being, in the broader sense … It doesn’t make homes for people.”
Over time, Alexander developed theories that applied what he learned at Rat Park to a variety of societal conditions, perhaps none starker than those of the war on drugs itself.
“The ultimate effect of prohibition is to put people in cages,” he says. “To marginalize people and say, ‘You’re not like the rest of us; you are possessed by this drug, and you are out of control.’ Well, immediately, you’ve made that person less than a human being. That is another way of putting them in a cage. The difference between people and rats is, with rats, you can see the cage, and with people, you can’t always see the cage. You have to look for them carefully, and that’s what I’ve been doing for a few decades.”
Eventually, the original set of experiments at Rat Park did attract considerable attention from researchers working on drug issues and addiction, though to this day, not all of it is positive. What Alexander calls the “demon drug theory” remains deeply entrenched in mainstream North American society. But Alexander’s ideas about the impacts that environment and social conditions can have on an individual’s propensity to addiction have gained a degree of acceptance.
For Mark Townsend, who discovered Alexander’s work shortly after he arrived in Vancouver, it had the force of a bolt of lightning.
“Rat Park was a very big deal for us,” he says.
17Avram Goldstein, “Heroin Maintenance: A Medical View. A Conversation between a Physician and a Politician,” Journal of Drug Issues 9 (1979): 341-347.
18Bruce Alexander, Robert Coambs, Patricia Hadaway, “The Effect of Housing and Gender on Morphine Self-Administration in Rats,” Psychopharmacology 58 (1978): 175-179.
19Robins, Lee, “Vietnam Veterans’ Rapid Recovery from Heroin Addiction: A Fluke or Normal Expectation?” Addiction 88 (1993): 1,041-1,054.
20Robins, “Vietnam Veterans’ …”
Chapter 6
Growing Up Radical
When Ann Livingston arrived in Vancouver in the early 1990s, she was thirty-nine years old but looked a decade younger. She usually wore a beautiful light summer dress paired with trademark combat boots. Her long hair, parted in the middle, and kind eyes behind wise-owl glasses evoked a contemporary portrait of a 1960s flower child. Livingston was a single mother with three boys. David was twelve, John was six, and Angus was four.
It was June 1993, and the month before, she’d left her partner in a hurried move from Victoria, looking for a fresh start.
She had lived in Vancouver for several years in the 1970s and had happy memories of the Downtown Eastside. Back then, East Hastings Street was a long row of middle-class shops anchored by Woodward’s Department Store. But in the two decades that followed, most of those businesses had closed and were mostly replaced by pawnshops and cheap beer parlours. Still, Livingston retained a fondness for the area, and in 1993 settled in the Four Sister’s Co-op, a family-friendly housing complex that the Portland Hotel’s parent organization, DERA, had brought to the neighbourhood. Comprised of three buildings positioned around a central courtyard, it was a fine place to raise her boys.
One hot afternoon toward the end of August of their first year in Vancouver, David, John, and Angus were outside playing with other children in the co-op’s grassy courtyard. Livingston was in the kitchen of their second-floor apartment when she heard a woman call for help from outside on the street.
“She’s passed out! Call 9-1-1,” the woman cried. Livingston did and then rushed outside to find her boys and more than a dozen other children peering through the fence that separated their complex from the alley it bordered. A young Indigenous woman had overdosed and another was working to resuscitate her.
“She lay in the alley, legs folded underneath her, arms straight out to her sides,” reads a journal entry Livingston wrote about the experience. “Her midriff showed, and I saw it heave and fall rhythmically as she sluggishly seizured.”
There was no sign of the ambulance that Livingston had called, so, thinking it would be faster, she proceeded on foot to the closest fire hall, which was located just around the corner from the Four Sister’s Co-op. There, Livingston found a group of firefighters smoking cigarettes and watching dancers come and go from the No. 5 Orange, a strip club directly across the street.
“We’ve got someone down over here,” Livingston told them. The guys didn’t respond with any urgency but followed her back to the woman in the alley, where they took over. While the firefighters fixed an oxygen mask on her, the children watched from the other side of the fence. One of them spotted a man they had seen with the woman before she overdosed. “That’s the man who put the needle in her arm,” Livingston recalls the kids shouting. “A lynch mob of innocent children,” she jokes.
The firefighters grew annoyed with the crowd and asked Livingston to leave. But she stood her ground, unable to pull herself away. A second later, the woman’s chest heaved as life returned to her and she gasped for a large breath. “It was an intimate moment,” Livingston says. “How the air just gets electric. The children really noticed it.”
Livingston recalls that when she was growing up, there were three lessons that her mother and father reiterated over and over again. The first, from her mother, was to be a good neighbour. The second, from her father, was that she should understand her surroundings, her environment, and her place within it. And the third, from both of them: “Don’t believe everything you’re told at school,” Livingston says. “Really question things.”
“We were always trained to be these troublemakers,” she continues. “So following all that, I start making calls: ‘What are all these overdoses about?’”
Ann Livingston at a demonstration for drug-users’ rights in the spring of 1997.
Photo: Duncan Murdoch
Ann Livingston was born in Nelson, BC, on November 30, 1954. Her family lived in the nearby mining town of Salmo, where her father, Ed, worked as a geological engineer. He moved the family to the larger interior town of Kamloops when Livingston was two years old and settled the family there for the next five years. Livingston’s mother, Dorothy, had a degree in social work and had previously worked in New York City with recovering heroin addicts and, before that, disadvantaged children in Harlem. It’s that tendency of her mother’s to care for others that characterizes Livingston’s earliest memories.
“We were always going to Indian reserves,” she says. “There must have been a dirt road running through the reserve near Kamloops because I can remember this haywire dirt road that we used to drive up with piles of kids’ clothes.”
In the 1950s, most Indigenous communities in Canada existed in varying states of
poverty and disrepair. They were neglected by the government, held few opportunities for meaningful employment, and were prone to social problems largely related to alcohol abuse and addiction. Livingston remembers that her mother was shocked by the underdeveloped conditions in which the government allowed the Indigenous reserves to remain. Livingston was the middle child of five and aged five or six by this time, just old enough to assist her mother with chores and not yet old enough to seek independence from her parents. “I was kind of like my mom’s little helper,” Livingston says of that time.
“I remember one day this young woman came to our house, and I thought she was ill or something,” she recalls. “My mother took her upstairs and put her in her bed, and we were all shushed because she was taking a nap and sleeping.”
The woman wasn’t sick, Livingston realized years later. She was drunk. A resident of the nearby reserve, the woman had run into some sort of trouble with police. When the officers threatened to take her to jail, she had given them Livingston’s mother’s name, betting correctly that with an association to a white family, the police would treat her with enough respect to refrain from throwing her in a cell.
“My mother didn’t put her on the porch in case she vomited or something,” Livingston says. “She got my parents’ bed. And only anyone who was a special guest to our house got put in my parents’ bed, because it was the only part of the house where you wouldn’t be harassed by these five children.”
Livingston took the lesson to heart. An entire lifetime later, at her apartment at the Four Sister’s Co-op, neighbours repeatedly reprimanded her for bringing homeless people in off the street and allowing them to crash on her couch for a night or two, or sometimes for much longer. “It’s just being neighbourly, really,” Livingston says.
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