High Price

including addiction. Indeed, a great deal of pathological drug use is driven by unmet social needs, by being alienated and having difficulty connecting with others.
    The majority of people who avoid drug problems, in contrast, tend to have strong social networks. Large extended families like mine, where dozens of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents live close to each other, help prevent the wearing daily stress of living in poverty from being even worse. And these networks can be protective, even when they include drug users. For example, many of the older DJs in our group and their friends smoked weed, but they kept it away from me. My older friends and brothers-in-law wanted to protect me. They weren’t moralistic about it. When I was young they felt weed wasn’t appropriate for a kid of eleven or twelve and when I got older, they knew I didn’t want anything to hinder my athletic performance.
    The important role of social connections in pathological drug use was actually seen in the early work on dopamine if you knew where to look for it, and it was also predicted by the behavioral principles originally propounded by B. F. Skinner. Indeed, even in rat models of addiction—which are just models because they cannot reflect all of the complexities of human behavior—it is clear that excessive drug intake is not simply caused by mere exposure to a substance.
    This was demonstrated in dramatic fashion by Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander and his colleagues. 4 These researchers conducted an important series of experiments that have come to be known as Rat Park. Alexander had recognized that the environment in which most lab rats are kept is unnatural for their species. Like people, rats are extremely social animals and get stressed if kept in isolation—but that was the “normal” condition for most rats used in drug research. Thus Alexander wanted to find out whether the lack of rewarding alternatives—what we call alternative reinforcers—like social contact, exercise, and sex would affect their choices about whether to take drugs.
    To do so, these researchers created an enriched environment for the rodents, which more closely modeled their natural habitat. In this enclosure, there were lots of other rats for social contact and mating, interesting places to explore, exercise toys, and dark refuges in which to nest (rats avoid bright, open spaces). Rat Park also offered its residents another amenity: morphine-laced water, sweetened enough to be appealing for rats to drink.
    The researchers then compared the morphine use of rats living in Rat Park to that of those kept in ordinary, isolated cages. They found that while the isolated rats quickly took to morphine drinking, the Rat Park rats did not. Indeed, even when the morphine solution was so sweet as to be overwhelmingly attractive to rats, the Rat Park residents still drank much less of it than the solitary animals did. Under some circumstances, the isolated rats would drink twenty times more morphine than their social-living compatriots.
    The same kinds of results have now been found with cocaine and amphetamine. For example, rats reared in enriched environments take less cocaine or amphetamine than those raised in isolation. 5
    When natural rewards, such as social and sexual contact and pleasant living conditions—also known as alternative reinforcers—are available to healthy animals, they are typically preferred. There is now a plethora of evidence collected in animals and humans showing that the availability of nondrug alternative reinforcers decreases drug use across a range of conditions.
    Indeed, many researchers have found that making sweets available to rats reduces their preference for cocaine and can even prevent them from developing a preference for it in the first place. 6 One typical study in this literature found that 94 percent of rats preferred saccharin-sweetened water to intravenous cocaine. 7 In another series of experiments, in this case with rhesus monkeys, researchers found that the animals’ choice to take cocaine is reduced in proportion to the size of the food reward they are offered as an alternative. 8 While people are now using this kind of data to claim that junk food is as addictive as cocaine, this logic is circular: cocaine was supposed to be especially addictive because animals preferred it to food when hungry; now food substituting for cocaine is used as evidence of the reverse.
    And contrary to claims that