This required building a great big plywood box on the floor of our laboratory, filling it with things that rats like, such as platforms for climbing, tin cans for hiding in, wood chips for strewing around, and running wheels for exercise. We compared the drug intake of rats housed in a reasonably normal environment 24 hours a day with rats kept in isolation in the solitary confinement cages that were standard in those days. How can we possibly reach conclusions about complex, perhaps spiritual experiences like human addiction and recovery by studying rats? Aren’t we more complex and soulful than rats, even if we have similar social needs?Ī small group of colleagues at Simon Fraser University, including Robert Coambs, Patricia Hadaway, Barry Beyerstein, and myself undertook to test the conclusion about irresistibly addicting drugs that had been reached from the earlier rat studies. Might isolated rats not need to numb their minds in solitary confinement for the same reason that people do? Second, taking drugs in a Skinner box where almost no effort is required and there is nothing else to do is nothing like human addiction which always involves making choices between many possible alternatives. Solitary confinement drives people crazy if prisoners in solitary have the chance to take mind-numbing drugs, they do. Putting such a creature in solitary confinement would be the equivalent of doing the same thing to a human being. First, the ancestors of laboratory rats in nature are highly social, sexual, and industrious creatures. Actually, it was more than a stretch it was a bone-cracking, joint-popping contortion of normal reason, for several reasons. But then I began to realize that it was a stretch. Irresistibly addicting drugs certainly cannot be allowed to circulate in human society, especially if, as we were told, this is your brain on drugs…įigure 5 – Frequently broadcast Fried-egg Image of Addictive Drugs (1987)Īt first, the conclusion that was reached from this rat research made sense to me. The rat research provided additional support for the War on Drugs of that day. The conclusion that illegal drugs are irresistibly addicting fit well with the fearsome images that were being propagated about them. The results seemed to prove that these drugs were irresistibly addicting, even to rodents, and by extension, to human beings. The mass media of the day were quite excited about these experiments. Under appropriate conditions, rats would press the lever often enough to consume large amounts of heroin, morphine, amphetamine, cocaine, and other drugs in this situation. The drug passed through the tube and the needle into the rats’ bloodstreams almost instantaneously when they pushed the lever. This required tethering the rat to the ceiling of the box with tubing and surgically implanting a needle, or catheter, into their jugular veins. They perfected techniques that allowed the rats to inject small doses of a drug into themselves by pressing the lever. In the 1960s, some experimental psychologists began to think that the Skinner Box was a good place to study drug addiction. The data looked like this.ĭo you see any sign of rat angst or depression in these data? If not, the rats must be ok, right? We usually did not even look at the rats, but only at the data they produced in the Skinner Boxes by pressing their little levers. But we young psychologists were trained not to think about what the rats might be experiencing. The metal floor made it possible for the experiment to administer electric shocks when the experiment was about punishment rather than reward, which it often was.ĭo you think that this would qualify as psychological abuse of rats? Of course it would, if there were such a crime. Inside Skinner Boxes, the rats could get tiny pellets of food one at a time, provided they pushed a little lever on the side of the box over and over and over. In the worst of times they were starved for 24 hours or more and put into Skinner Boxes that looked like this… Unlike human prisoners, the rats did not even get an exercise period outside their cramped cages.Īnd that was in the best of times. The only visual stimulation they got was seeing the people who brought food and water and cleaned the metal pans under their cages every few days. When I was an experimental psychologist, between about 19, white laboratory rats had to live in solitary confinement cellblocks like this…Īlthough the rats lived in close proximity, they could neither see nor touch each other, because the sides of their cages were made of sheet metal. …you certainly wouldn’t want to live in a psychology laboratory. Alexander,Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University