Why "The War on Drugs" Is Not Effective

I’m a total psychology nerd. A few months ago I read Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological experiments of the Twentieth Century, by Lauren Slater. There was an interesting vignette in there about Dr. Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park. This experiment dealt with morphine addiction in rats. There were 2 groups: rats in a normal laboratory cage, and rats in “Rat Park,” a utopia of sorts for rats. Both groups of rats were given the same choice: regular tap water, or sweetened water with morphine. Rats have a proclivity to sweetened water. In some of the experiments, the rats were forced to drink only morphine-laced water for 57 days prior to being given a choice. The rats in the regular cage drank only the water with morphine; in fact, they consumed 20 times more morphine than the rats in Rat Park. They even drank the morphine water when it had no sweetener (morphine is naturally bitter, which the rats do not like.)

When Naxalone, a substance that cancels the narcotic effects of morphine, was added, the Rat Park rats drank the sweet water, proving that they preferred the sweetness, but did not want the effects of the morphine. Even when they became forced addicts by being given only morphine water for 57 days, they returned to tap water when given a choice.

So what does this mean? This means that the $1200 per second ($40 billion dollars per year) that the government spent in 2003 to stop drug use was worthless. The government can give out all the methadone and run all the rehab hospitals it wants, but without fixing the communities in which these people live, none of it will work. Happy rats did not become addicts. How many truly happy people do you know who are addicts? How many addicts are truly happy? We need to start looking at our education and healthcare systems; as well as the condition of our cities. This is not likely to happen with a Republican in office.

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