Welcome to Rat Park

Hi. I’m Carl Erik Fisher, an addiction psychiatrist, Columbia University bioethicist, writer, and person in recovery. Not too long ago, I wrote a book—The Urge: Our History of Addiction—as a way to make some sense of addiction for my family, my patients, and myself. That sense-making is still a work in progress, so I’m starting this Substack newsletter as an experiment in learning and sharing in a more direct way, with a focus on what addiction and recovery have to teach us about thriving and flourishing.

The Urge focused largely on understanding addiction, but I felt like it only scratched the surface of what is commonly called recovery, along with the notion that addiction is in all of us. I am excited to pick up those threads and go deeper.

In the near term, I’ll be posting some exploratory, longer-form writings about frameworks for understanding this idea of recovery, based on recent research in psychotherapy and neuroscience, and tempered by insights from ethics, philosophy, and the humanities. I say “exploratory” because I tend to be a perfectionist, but since the book came out, I’ve spoken to various audiences grappling with addiction, and I feel so acutely the historic crisis we are in: not just the stratospheric overdose deaths, but rising alcohol problems, struggles with screens, liberalized sports betting and other gambling, money, power, status, the ego, and all the other everyday addictions that we are swimming in. I sure don’t have all the answers, but there’s a lot I encounter in my everday work that can be helpful and deserves to be out there. So this newsletter is an experiment and an exercise in sharing provisional, off-the-cuff work.

I want Rat Park to be a space for learning, showing my work, inviting feedback, and hearing from you. It’s about connection with people who share a passion for these topics, and I hope we can make it an interactive space that offers some measure of inspiration, mutual support, and collective exploration of the ideas that matter to us. I hope it proves helpful.

Why Rat Park?

“Rat Park” was a series of behavioral experiments conducted in the late 1970s to early ’80s by psychologist Bruce Alexander and colleagues. It’s significant both for its findings and how it has been adopted into the culture.¹

In traditional animal models, you can “addict” a rodent in a cage to drugs like morphine or cocaine, in the sense that it will self-administer drugs even to the point of harm. Alexander, however, noted that rats are social and sexual creatures that don’t normally live in little isolated cages. He created an “enriched environment” with much more space, opportunities to play and mate, and even fun little pine trees drawn on the walls, and he measured how living in “Rat Park” compared to the usual housing affected morphine consumption.

Not too shabby. Source: Bruce Alexander, The View from Rat Park, used with permission.

Sure enough, Alexander and colleagues found that rats in the enriched environment drank less morphine. Their conclusions were importantly restrained, arguing that “sex and housing are important variables” and that “theories that do not consider these factors run the risk of over-simplification.” Decades later, Rat Park was featured in Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream—this is where and how we got, “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.”. A torrent of oversimplified interpretations followed, extending well beyond the arguments of Alexander and his team (and Maté and Hari), sometimes implying that alienation, dislocation, or pain are the sole meaningful causes of addiction. Today, you see versions of this everywhere: drug treatment center slogans, YouTube videos, advocacy efforts, and mutual-help recovery meetings. There have been some good discussions of its social and scientific legacy, including a post on Slate Star Codex (now part of Substack’s Astral Codex Ten) and a recent article in the journal Addiction.

Attributing addiction to a single cause is—need I say it?—misleadingly reductionistic. This issue is often the focal point of discussions of Rat Park, and it’s a timeless theme in discussions of addiction.  Social issues like housing scarcity, dislocation, and alienation are not “the” one, sole cause of addiction. There is no utopian future where fixing societal problems eradicates addiction. Even though the roles of trauma and social deprivation have been overlooked for too long, it’s also true that developing addiction does not necessarily mean one has been traumatized or neglected. It's hard to hold in mind that addiction is complex and multicausal.

There’s more to Rat Park, though. First, the experiment has had a shaky history of replication. One 1996 study, for example, found that isolated animals drank less morphine than those in that version of Rat Park, while other studies have reproduced the findings. Methodologies have evolved significantly in the intervening 40 years, raising questions about the value of direct replication. The underlying concept that social and environmental enrichment can reduce drug consumption has been supported by other studies—a replication of the underlying concept, if not the direct methods.

The more interesting question that the replication issue invokes is: how much can animal research really tell us about human addiction? This goes beyond a “replication” question to a “validation” question, and several recent writers have argued that existing animal models of addiction are actually impeding our understanding of addiction in humans because rodent models are fundamentally inappropriate. Two key points are: (1) animal models portray addiction as “compulsion,” but human drug use is purposeful, retaining elements of choice and goal-directed behavior (consider the way people with addiction make and execute challenging plans to get what they need), and (2) addiction might be inherently subjective and therefore human, because crucial elements rely on language and self-report, such as an inability to cut down despite wanting to, or violating one’s prior intentions about use.

Tellingly, Bruce Alexander’s broader contribution to the field is his magisterial book, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, which draws on extensive work in various fields, such as politics, economics, humanities, philosophy, and more. It goes far beyond lab work and far deeper than the oversimplified retellings of Rat Park.

And yet, a lot of good came from the Rat Park story. It has helped to shift the focus from solely biological causes and individual determinants of addiction toward a broader understanding—especially important in the context of anti-drug propaganda, a hyperindividualistic culture, and general ignorance about addiction. The Rat Park story has, in Alexander’s own words, functioned as a kind of corrective “parable.” Just recently, when I explained Rat Park to a smart novelist friend who hadn’t heard of it before, it inspired him to reduce his late-night, app-enabled McDonald’s binges. It’s useful to remember that we’re not alone in our battles against cravings. We’re all still on the addiction spectrum. We all need some variety of recovery, our own rat parks. When we stray away from our parks, or fail to build them, we run into problems.

So I want to be clear that my intention is to honor Rat Park and what it stands for: the need to look beyond the individual, essential, biological understandings of addiction, but also the difficulty in studying the complicated phenomena of addiction and recovery in the first place. Rat Park, in other words, symbolizes the competing meanings, interpretations, and uses of ideas about addiction and recovery. The terrible difficulty of understanding addiction and the absolute necessity for interdisciplinary explorations. The tension between putting knowledge to work—to try to do something to help our addiction crisis—and the need for humility. The necessity of doing this work in provisional way but still to do it. At least that's my understanding, and what I hope to keep front of mind in naming this newsletter. I’m going to be running some experiments myself, and experiments don’t always give you clean answers.

What’s Next?

I want this to be open-ended, experimental, and interactive, so you may see different formats:

• new episodes of my interview podcast, Flourishing After Addiction;

• longer-form posts;

• behind-the-scenes info and works in progress;

• more explicitly practical resources, tools, and insights from my work;

• curated links and reads; and

• guest posts.

The pervasive logic of our digital world is to launch projects like these as bold ideologies, calls-to-arms, or manifestos. I won’t be doing that here. My goal—as both a doctor and someone in recovery—is to explore nuanced, pragmatic, pluralistic, and humanistic (i.e., whole-person) accounts of addiction. I resist the divisive binaries of us/them, healthy/disordered, or normal/diseased. I see medical science as immensely useful and fascinating, and also just one of many ways to make sense of the world. My commitment is to seek out what is truly helpful across fields like science, philosophy, and spirituality, even while respecting those disciplines’ limitations. I see addiction as a universal human phenomenon that reflects some of the most important and fascinating questions about all of human life, thought, and action.

I want to hear from you. Please comment, or just write me, to share your thoughts and experiences.

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More about me, for the new folks: my book, The Urge: Our History of Addiction, was published by Penguin Press in January 2022 and named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The Boston Globe. I maintain a small, psychotherapy-focused clinical practice and am particularly interested in applying the evolving science of mindfulness, meditation, and other contemplative practices to addiction and recovery. I host the podcast “Flourishing After Addiction,” featuring deep-dive interviews with researchers, clinicians, writers, spiritual teachers, philosophers, and others who are working at the forefront of addiction and recovery. I regularly teach, consult, and give talks on these topics.

All of my work is oriented toward giving my patients, students, readers, and listeners what I still want for myself and what is still very much a work in progress: finding some freedom from addictive cycles, developing ways of working with our pain, and going beyond stopping use to transformational change and thriving in recovery.

1. “Rat Park” is also a great name, and I struggle to name things, so many thanks to Holly Whitaker for giving it to me.