Life From Outside the Rat Park

And here I thought life was all about that Rat Race out there. When was someone going to tell me about the Rat Parks?

Back in the 1970s researchers had already observed that rats, when housed in bland habitats in solitary conditions were offered a choice of plain drinking water or water laced with cocaine or heroin more often than not the rats would choose to consume the substance laced offering repeatedly in an act to activate the pleasure triggers often enough that their bodies would be overtaken and thus suffered from an early death.

Early psychologist, Dr Bruce Alexander, looked into this happening even further. He questioned the understandings of addiction and the misconception that it is simply a chemically based disease but perhaps something more.

We would be much better served to remember Dr. Alexander’s experiments and more importantly, you and I could truly save lives!

The experiments, in the 1970s, have come to be called the “Rat Park.1

Realizing that life is a multifaceted experience he began to question the rat’s solitary existence and the roll it played in their decision to drink drug-laced waters. What would happen if given the same choices in a community setting?

To find out he placed his rats into parks where they were among others and allowed to interact and roam about and play with one another freely. They were able to socialize and go on in a normal society type setting. There they were also offered the same two choices on waters.

When living in the Rat Parks the participants overwhelmingly chose the clean water over the drug-laced option If they did take from the less preferred offering it was very intermittently and they never over indulged and none overdosed.

I think this is a HUGE thing to know! Humans are communal creatures just as are rats. In the covid years being held in solitary conditions we have seen on awful and undeniable rise in drug related deaths. The experience taxed us in so many ways and some we have yet to understand.

For those of us who come from families who enact the tactics of shunning the incredible harm and everlasting despair is nothing shy of being totally ingulfed in solitary confinement with not so much as a tiny window crack at the other end of the tunnel to illuminate even a molecule of light.

The Rat Park shows that there is such an easy prescription that doesn’t need a physician’s pad to fill. A simple call, a post-it notes even, just a hint that someone from your foundational roots even remembers your life before the covid years could end someone’s pain in a way so much better than suicide.

In this day of technologies some of us grew exhausted after 1095 days and nights of not hearing even 1 family members voice following a phone’s ring.

Since March 2023 the covid restrictions have fully been lifted. As I walk about, I notice the smiles, the twinkling whites of a person’s eye as they excuse themselves to quickly handle their lived one’s brief interruption. I feel the loss each and every time I am to be reminded, I am one of the rats placed in the solitary experiment, placed there by a family who believes in the art of Shunning. The eventual outcome is already known.

If you are also one of these rats living life outside the Rat Park, I beg you, please contact me! If the feelings I’ve mentioned here are becoming too much, please contact me! If not be, contact someone!

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