Bruce Alexander Character Analysis

If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.

Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.” Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively.

Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
[…] [Eric Sterling] told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, […] the head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.

So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture.

“To see people’s faces and how they changed—they saw, I have worth, I have value. I’m able to help somebody else. I’m no longer just what they call me in the newspapers. […] If we’re off demonstrating, we’re having board meetings deciding what to do, and thinking about what our next actions could be, how is so and so doing, how can we help so and so because he got busted again—all that’s taking you away from just being totally fixed on ‘I got to get a drug, I got to get a drug, drug drug drug.’”

If your environment is like Rat Park—a safe, happy community with lots of healthy bonds and pleasurable things to do—you will not be especially vulnerable to addiction. If your environment is like the rat cages—where you feel alone, powerless and purposeless—you will be.

Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.” Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively.

Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?
[…] [Eric Sterling] told me that if any government-funded scientist ever produced research suggesting anything beyond the conventional drugs-hijack-brains theory, […] the head of NIDA would be called before a congressional committee and asked if she had gone mad. She might be fired. She would certainly be stopped. All the people conducting the science for NIDA—and remember, that’s 90 percent of research on the globe into illegal drugs—know this.

So they steer away from all this evidence and look only at the chemical effects of the drugs themselves. That’s not fake—but it’s only a small part of the picture.

“To see people’s faces and how they changed—they saw, I have worth, I have value. I’m able to help somebody else. I’m no longer just what they call me in the newspapers. […] If we’re off demonstrating, we’re having board meetings deciding what to do, and thinking about what our next actions could be, how is so and so doing, how can we help so and so because he got busted again—all that’s taking you away from just being totally fixed on ‘I got to get a drug, I got to get a drug, drug drug drug.’”