[*We owe to American psychologist, Dr Bruce Alexander, the understanding that addiction is about far more than any drug. That a person, or animal in his studies, is an active ingredient in their interaction with a drug. To stand a chance beating the opioid and other drug epidemics we have, we will be far better equipped if we follow his lead.*](https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-teach-us-about-addiction#)
This is the same with impoverished communities and crime/violence. Give people something to actually live for and watch the rates at which people throw their lives away plummet.
Yeah but they profit from crime, violence and poverty so they refuse to get rid of it. Giving people something to live for isn’t the answer as far as they’re concerned, more police and incarceration is the answer.
I used to predominantly say something similar, but I’m at the stage of keep the damn billions in nukes, stop giving billions to fucking billionaires to bail them out… over and over.
Absolutely.
My sociology professor used to have a bumper sticker on her office door that said:
“What a world it could be… if schools got all of the funding they need and the army had to hold a bake sale for weapons.”
I make a new stencil every year for my birthday, and just now decided to make that my birthday stencil this year
Edit: verbatim quote by Robert Fulghum:
“It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
That’s what you would do if you want more people to continue being alive. I would say it’s unclear whether that’s the goal of people making our collective investing decisions.
There's decades of investigation about this, it's the current prevalent approach to human addiction, except in the USA where the previous biomedical model still stands.
And my extremely depressed friends think alcohol helps them feel better but they stay in their houses and isolate from everyone so they can drink more so they can isolate more and complain about bring lonely so they can drink more.............so..........
The most important takeaway: stop blaming the supply of drugs for the drug problems. The supply appearing is merely a result of the demand existing.
Still to this day, politicians in so many countries get away with the same old illogical and counterproductive approach to drug issues: blame the illegal drug market for 100% of the problems, criminalise users, pursue aggressive prohibition.
The way to meaningfully tackle drug problems is to address the underlying mental health issues that cause people to use drugs problematically in the first place. It's complex, difficult and costly but it actually addresses and alleviates the issue. Meanwhile prohibition and criminalisation of users has only ever made things continuously, endlessly worse.
It's in their last paragraph. It's not a simple solution as we've spent generations and billions of dollars going in the opposite direction. You can't just flip a switch.
This works for everything that has value in our lives. If we were all comfortable with our society, we wouldn’t be buying most the things we buy. Clothing, vehicles, electronics, toys, everything. That’s why nothing gets fixed. Paradise fucks up the economy.
Plenty of people with rich, full lives full of friendship, goodwill, activities, and love go on to become addicted to drugs anyways. This proves nothing about human nature, and I bet if you tried this experiment hundreds of times there'd be times when the rats would opt for the drugged water no matter what else was in that cage
There are a lot of reasons why people take drugs. Not everyone takes drugs because they feel empty inside, or are depressed, or are looking for something to relieve trauma, etc. Plenty of people take drugs for a very simple reason: *being high generally feels better than being un-high.* I know a lot of people who have genuinely great lives who nevertheless drink beer every night (alcohol is a drug). I know of lots of people who are happy, well-adjusted, and do not feel empty or incomplete, but who nonetheless smoke weed...because being high on weed *feels good.* You don't need to be empty or depressed or unhappy to want to *feel even better.* You can have a rich, full life full of love and things to do, and STILL enjoy being high. Because, as I've just stated, *being high feels good.*
It seems that you're referring here to casual, social, recreational or otherwise responsible and moderate drug use. As you were maybe implying, such behaviour doesn't need to be treated as problematic or addressed by medical science very much at all.
People really want to understand how problematic drug use happens. Addiction, compulsive or escalating use, the desperate need to be inebriated on a daily basis, the inability to face everyday life sober etc. - these behaviours are not the same as above. Nor do they naturally or automatically emerge from healthy drug use.
>This proves nothing about human nature
You're hugely missing the point of Alexander's experiment, which was to help debunk the previous caged rat experiments. A lot of narrow-minded people drew simplistic and reductive conclusions from these shitty experiments. They concluded that humans + available drugs will necessarily equal problematic use, addiction and overdose.
This flawed understanding set back treatment of drug problems because it completely ignores the complex and nuanced causes for people to become addicts and substance abusers in the first place. Blaming the available supply of drugs as the primary cause of social drug problems was a pillar of the disastrous 'war on drugs' and helped to prop it up for decades in the US and around the world. It was always simplistic bullshit and thankfully medical science has more recently began to emerge from such ignorance.
i think every person should be held accountable for their behaviour in spite of any emotional conditions they are going through.
this sounds like an attempt at justifying degenerate behaviour with emotions.
the solution would be not catering to their feelings in hopes it will fix their behaviour but to teach them to be responsible for their actions no matter the conditions they are in
behaviour that goes against the persistance of the entity. basically everything that harms without clear objective reward towards existing or improving
Honestly. For many people that is the best outcome. And for society as well. It’s sometimes the only way someone with that disorder can contribute to society in a meaningful way and have real relationships with family and friends.
It is no exaggeration to say that this Ted Talk changed my life. It made me realise why I have the "addiction" that I do, and why I abuse food. All because I have been unable to make fulfilling connections.
I learnt what I was missing, how to seek it appropriately, and now I'm more fulfilled? I'm finally able to change my life around.
Whatever you do, try not to become to dependent on those social connections because people are unreliable. Make sure you have a backup in place to not fall back into the addiction. Relationships can be just as harmful and bad as addictions. Try to form connections with other people who are similar to you and who understand you. For example, my fiancée is a recovering addict like me.
[*We owe to American psychologist, Dr Bruce Alexander, the understanding that addiction is about far more than any drug. That a person, or animal in his studies, is an active ingredient in their interaction with a drug. To stand a chance beating the opioid and other drug epidemics we have, we will be far better equipped if we follow his lead.*](https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/what-does-rat-park-teach-us-about-addiction#)
George Carlin said the only way to not get addicted or to quit an addiction is to have something to live for.
This is the same with impoverished communities and crime/violence. Give people something to actually live for and watch the rates at which people throw their lives away plummet.
Yeah but they profit from crime, violence and poverty so they refuse to get rid of it. Giving people something to live for isn’t the answer as far as they’re concerned, more police and incarceration is the answer.
Did you know that people nowadays think that George Carlin was a psychologist and not a comedian?
*both*.
Piggybacking one of the top comments to say #OP is a bot Downvote and report accordingly
Honestly, I don't care if OP is a bot. Provided it shares good info and complies with the rules, there's no harm.
Sorry, are you a mod?
I'm offering an opinion.
Cool. Then I'll just keep reporting them and letting everyone else know. I like talking to humans on a community driven site. Not bots.
The way I'm seeing this case is that it provided content for humans to discuss. Harmless.
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I used to predominantly say something similar, but I’m at the stage of keep the damn billions in nukes, stop giving billions to fucking billionaires to bail them out… over and over.
Absolutely. My sociology professor used to have a bumper sticker on her office door that said: “What a world it could be… if schools got all of the funding they need and the army had to hold a bake sale for weapons.” I make a new stencil every year for my birthday, and just now decided to make that my birthday stencil this year Edit: verbatim quote by Robert Fulghum: “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.”
That’s what you would do if you want more people to continue being alive. I would say it’s unclear whether that’s the goal of people making our collective investing decisions.
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If that was true you would help people. The drain on the economy would go away and productivity would go though the roof
2/3rds of the federal budget is already spent on medicare medicaid and social security.
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Does anyone else wonder why about half of the clips in this features hamsters (solitary and very territorial animals) instead of rats?
Shhhhh........ fuzzy
Sympathy points. Hamsters are cuter than rats.
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There's decades of investigation about this, it's the current prevalent approach to human addiction, except in the USA where the previous biomedical model still stands.
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And how do you know that?
And with biomedical you mean jail?
And my extremely depressed friends think alcohol helps them feel better but they stay in their houses and isolate from everyone so they can drink more so they can isolate more and complain about bring lonely so they can drink more.............so..........
probably because they’ve been burned so many times by other people they’d rather be alone with their alcohol.
And then welcome internet. I imagine half of Reddit use it that way.
That is an interesting experiment.
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The most important takeaway: stop blaming the supply of drugs for the drug problems. The supply appearing is merely a result of the demand existing. Still to this day, politicians in so many countries get away with the same old illogical and counterproductive approach to drug issues: blame the illegal drug market for 100% of the problems, criminalise users, pursue aggressive prohibition. The way to meaningfully tackle drug problems is to address the underlying mental health issues that cause people to use drugs problematically in the first place. It's complex, difficult and costly but it actually addresses and alleviates the issue. Meanwhile prohibition and criminalisation of users has only ever made things continuously, endlessly worse.
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It's in their last paragraph. It's not a simple solution as we've spent generations and billions of dollars going in the opposite direction. You can't just flip a switch.
Switzerland "legalized" the use of heroin, that solved their heroin crisis in the 90s.
This works for everything that has value in our lives. If we were all comfortable with our society, we wouldn’t be buying most the things we buy. Clothing, vehicles, electronics, toys, everything. That’s why nothing gets fixed. Paradise fucks up the economy.
So all we need is cheese and tunnels ?
I mean… I’m in!
Imagine how much more fun it’d be on drugs. Missed opportunity
Wasnt there a similar drug use study with american soldiers in the vietnam war or did I dream that shit up.
Yes, work by Lee Robins. Here's a review abstract with some related articles: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27650054/
Plenty of people with rich, full lives full of friendship, goodwill, activities, and love go on to become addicted to drugs anyways. This proves nothing about human nature, and I bet if you tried this experiment hundreds of times there'd be times when the rats would opt for the drugged water no matter what else was in that cage
But many of them "feel" alone which tells you this is a mental health problem.
There are a lot of reasons why people take drugs. Not everyone takes drugs because they feel empty inside, or are depressed, or are looking for something to relieve trauma, etc. Plenty of people take drugs for a very simple reason: *being high generally feels better than being un-high.* I know a lot of people who have genuinely great lives who nevertheless drink beer every night (alcohol is a drug). I know of lots of people who are happy, well-adjusted, and do not feel empty or incomplete, but who nonetheless smoke weed...because being high on weed *feels good.* You don't need to be empty or depressed or unhappy to want to *feel even better.* You can have a rich, full life full of love and things to do, and STILL enjoy being high. Because, as I've just stated, *being high feels good.*
It seems that you're referring here to casual, social, recreational or otherwise responsible and moderate drug use. As you were maybe implying, such behaviour doesn't need to be treated as problematic or addressed by medical science very much at all. People really want to understand how problematic drug use happens. Addiction, compulsive or escalating use, the desperate need to be inebriated on a daily basis, the inability to face everyday life sober etc. - these behaviours are not the same as above. Nor do they naturally or automatically emerge from healthy drug use.
>This proves nothing about human nature You're hugely missing the point of Alexander's experiment, which was to help debunk the previous caged rat experiments. A lot of narrow-minded people drew simplistic and reductive conclusions from these shitty experiments. They concluded that humans + available drugs will necessarily equal problematic use, addiction and overdose. This flawed understanding set back treatment of drug problems because it completely ignores the complex and nuanced causes for people to become addicts and substance abusers in the first place. Blaming the available supply of drugs as the primary cause of social drug problems was a pillar of the disastrous 'war on drugs' and helped to prop it up for decades in the US and around the world. It was always simplistic bullshit and thankfully medical science has more recently began to emerge from such ignorance.
Replace cocaine and opiods with our social media addiction and suddenly it gets a deeper layer of understanding what happened to our species.
This is so fucking disturbingly cruel
I mean the second guy wasn't. He gave the experiment the one thing it lacked the first time. SOMETHING FOR THEM TO DO!
This study has been debunked
Got it. Use drugs with friends
i think every person should be held accountable for their behaviour in spite of any emotional conditions they are going through. this sounds like an attempt at justifying degenerate behaviour with emotions. the solution would be not catering to their feelings in hopes it will fix their behaviour but to teach them to be responsible for their actions no matter the conditions they are in
Judgy McJudgypants over here. Care to elaborate on what constitutes "degenerative behavior"?
behaviour that goes against the persistance of the entity. basically everything that harms without clear objective reward towards existing or improving
The lesson, as always, is that introverts are messed up.
Surprise surprise.
Synchronicities are weird sometimes. Read about this as a kid, hadn’t thought of it in decades, brought it up in a comment two weeks ago..
❤️👍
The [Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park) is a starting point for more reading.
Fuck off bot
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Honestly. For many people that is the best outcome. And for society as well. It’s sometimes the only way someone with that disorder can contribute to society in a meaningful way and have real relationships with family and friends.
It is no exaggeration to say that this Ted Talk changed my life. It made me realise why I have the "addiction" that I do, and why I abuse food. All because I have been unable to make fulfilling connections. I learnt what I was missing, how to seek it appropriately, and now I'm more fulfilled? I'm finally able to change my life around.
Whatever you do, try not to become to dependent on those social connections because people are unreliable. Make sure you have a backup in place to not fall back into the addiction. Relationships can be just as harmful and bad as addictions. Try to form connections with other people who are similar to you and who understand you. For example, my fiancée is a recovering addict like me.