When they moved into Rat Park, they were allowed to choose between the morphine solution and plain water. In another experiment, he forced rats in ordinary lab cages to consume the morphine-laced solution for 57 days without other liquid available to drink. Even more significant, he writes, was that when he added naloxone, a drug which negates the effects of opioids, to the morphine-laced water, the Rat Park rats began to drink it.
They wanted the sweet water, he concluded, so long as it did not disrupt their normal social behavior. These animals rejected the morphine solution when it was stronger, but as it became sweeter and more dilute, they began to drink almost as much as the rats that had lived in cages throughout the experiment. He writes that the most interesting group was Group CP, the rats who were brought up in cages but moved to Rat Park before the experiment began. They would try it occasionally-with the females trying it more often than the males-but they showed a statistically significant preference for the plain water. The rats in Rat Park resisted the morphine water. The caged rats (Groups CC and PC) took to the morphine instantly, even with relatively little sweetener, with the caged males drinking 19 times more morphine than the Rat Park males in one of the experimental conditions.
#Rat utopia addiction Pc#
Group CC was isolated in laboratory cages when they were weaned at 22 days of age, and lived there until the experiment ended at 80 days of age Group PP was housed in Rat Park for the same period Group CP was moved from laboratory cages to Rat Park at 65 days of age and Group PC was moved out of Rat Park and into cages at 65 days of age. The Seduction Experiment involved four groups of 8 rats. Morphine solution was sweetened to reduce averse reaction to the taste of morphine as a control, prior to morphine introduction, rats were offered a sweetened quinine solution instead.Īlexander designed a number of experiments to test the rats' willingness to consume the morphine. One dispenser contained a sweetened morphine solution and the other plain tap water. In Rat Park, the rats could drink a fluid from one of two drop dispensers, which automatically recorded how much each rat drank. This research highlighted an important issue in the design of morphine-self administration studies of the time, namely the use of austere housing-conditions, which confound the results. The results of the experiment appeared to support his hypothesis that housing-conditions affect the consumption of morphine water. There were 16–20 rats of both sexes in residence, food, balls and wheels for play, and enough space for mating. To test this hypothesis, Alexander and his colleagues built Rat Park, a large housing colony 200 times the floor area of a standard laboratory cage.
Alexander hypothesized that these conditions may be responsible for exacerbating self-administration. Alexander and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.Īt the time of the studies, research exploring the self-administration of morphine in animals often used small, solitary metal cages.
#Rat utopia addiction series#
Rat Park was a series of studies into drug addiction conducted in the late 1970s and published between 19 by Canadian psychologist Bruce K. Housing facility built for laboratory rodents in studies of drug addiction
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