rats, morphine, and design

Sometimes I wonder how much impact design can actually have on peoples lives. Here's an interesting excerpt from an article that will give you hope (if you're interested in that sort of thing)

(From NYTimes Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/magazine/25addiction.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087%0A&en=7468d600894cb46a&ex=1151467200)


"Alexander is among a vocal group of addiction researchers who argue that focusing on a pill to treat addicts fails to address the primary cause of becoming and staying hooked: our unhappy, disconnected lives. Beginning in the late 1970's, Alexander and his team of researchers at Simon Fraser set out to study the role of our environment on addictive behavior. Until that point, most scientists studying addiction put rats in small, individual cages and watched as they eagerly guzzled drug-laced solutions and ignored water and food, sometimes dying in the process. This phenomenon was noted — first by researchers, then drug czars, then parents trying to keep their children off drugs — as proof of the inherently addictive quality of drugs and of the inevitable addiction of any human who used them. This was false, of course. Most people who use drugs don't become addicted.

So what made all those lab rats lose their minds? Bruce Alexander and his research team had a rather simple hypothesis: The rats had awful lives. They were stressed, lonely, bored and looking to self-medicate. To prove it, Alexander created a lab-rat heaven he called Rat Park. The 200-square-foot residence featured bright balls and tin cans to play with, painted creeks and trees to look at and plenty of room for mating and socializing.

Alexander took 16 lucky rats and plopped them into Rat Park, where they were offered water or a sweet, morphine-based cocktail (rats love sweets). Alexander offered the same two drinks to the control group of rats he left isolated in cages. The results? The rat-parkers were apparently having too much fun to bother with artificial highs, because they hardly touched the morphine solution, no matter how sweet Alexander and his colleagues made it. The isolated and arguably depressed rats, on the other hand, eagerly got high, drinking more than a dozen times the amount of the morphine solution as the rats in paradise."