Rat Park drug experiment cartoon

Other researches have tried and failed to reproduce Rat Park's results:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract

"The results of earlier research, indicating rats housed in a quasinatural colony drank significantly less sucrose-morphine than rats isolated in standard laboratory cages, could not be replicated"

The webcomic opens giving an option of three different navigation options -- left/right arrows, mouse, and touch.

With the exception of touch, which I don't have, these were all borked for me. The scroll over-scrolled, and the arrow navigation moved forward way too many frames, both of which behaviors I had a lot of trouble interrupting or escaping out of...

No, this is not another stereotyped HN comment meant to alert the author to a criticism/bug in UX/UI/etc.

Instead, I actually thought that the borked controls were part of the "Rat Park" experiment:

How do users behave when presented with multiple controls and one or more of these controls break (i.e., when they're up against the wall, where do they turn)?

I fully expected to see discussion on this returning to the comment section.

Framing, titles -- they're a funny thing!

Someone is a Led Zeppelin fan; the artwork references many of their album covers.

The last line/panel left me stunned (not going to repeat it, read the comic).

So beautifully put.

This was posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7734795, and has had a significant discussion within the last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6391701.

I’ve come to the realization we owe so much when it comes to medicine and psychology to our muroid rodents.

FWIW, this was posted on HN 8 months ago, and 7 months ago. (https://hn.algolia.com/?q=rat+park#!/story/forever/0/rat%20p...)

A lot of the more successful drug treatment programs today treat addiction as a symptom, not as the disease in and of itself. I'm glad that this model is gaining popularity, because I think it is the correct one.

I was lucky to have the chance to study with Dr. Carl Hart in college. His Drugs and Behavior class was one of the best I've ever taken - an actually scientific, medical look at drug use instead of haphazard generalizations that we have come accustomed to reading even in otherwise reputable news sources and even some academic settings.

A lot of Dr. Hart's research (at least at the time) involved methamphetamine - he is one of only a handful of people across the country authorized to administer methamphetamine in research settings (ie, for the purposes of a study).

I commonly see methamphetamine ("meth") used as a scapegoat these days, with references to it being a demon-drug, and how there is "no such thing as a casual meth user"[0].

Unfortunately, this caricature of methamphetamine is inaccurate, managing both to overstate and understate its risks. Methamphetamine is certainly habit-forming for a number of reasons, but one interesting fact to note is that, according to the most recent NSDUH report[1], half of all people who used methamphetamine in the last year don't meet DSM criteria for substance abuse (which is an even lower threshold than substance dependence)[2]. (Ironically, I've seen these reports cited to show how "prevalent" meth addiction is, pointing at the higher usage rates, but conveniently ignoring the questions which evaluate actual substance abuse and dependence - why let facts get in the way of a good scary narrative?)

Even if your goal is to reduce methamphetamine use across society, treating all users as "addicts" when, medically speaking, they are not is like sending all underage college students to Alcoholics Anonymous if they are caught with alcohol in dry dorms - it's clearly not going to be successful.

Trying to treat drug use as a problem in and of itself isn't a model that is backed by medical data or even our best understanding of psychology. We don't use this model for alcohol (we distinguish between the drug use and the atypical behaviour which defines pathological use[3]) or caffeine (in which we completely ignore pathological use, even when it is clearly present).

[0] This is, incidentally, almost the exact same rhetoric during the crack cocaine scare in the 80s, which is commonly accepted today as having been exaggerated for political reasons at the time.

[1] The NSDUH is one of the three standard ways that drug usage rates and turned are measured in the US. The raw numbers are usually less meaningful than the relative numbers, for obvious reasons.

[2] The DSM is flawed in many ways, so I am not holding it up as a gold standard by any means. Rather, it's an example of how a relatively strict (but still scientific) definition of substance abuse fails to model actual behavior appropriately.

[3] ie, the definition of "alcoholic" is generally understood to mean more than "someone who drinks alcohol"

Anyone know why the artist included at least two Led Zeppelin references? The font and shepherd in the first frame are alluding to Stairway to Heaven, and the sign in the last frame has the 4 symbols from IV.

It would be interesting to replicate the experiment with this in mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7662464

>>descended from wild Norway Rats, albino lab rats remain curious, gregarious social creatures

Nope! I have watched well fed lab rats attack and eat each other. In the wild they will often cannibalize their youth.

I think there's a lot of value in the conclusion there. We emphasize differences between ourselves (upstanding citizen vs. drug addict; religious believer vs. "atheist" or "hedonist", normal person vs. "insane") and moralize about that nonsense when, in fact, we're actually very similar. The original, mid-20th-century superstition was that hedonistic/recreational drug use (which is risky) would take over society and that use had to be criminalized. The reality is that, while almost everyone uses illegal drugs at least once in life, most people make the right choices regardless of law (enforcement is minuscule in the upper-middle and upper class) and, for those who don't, compassionate medical treatment works far better than imprisonment. People may be hedonistic in nature, but they're most often smart about it, so what's wrong with that?

I was never addicted to a drug, but I had a long-term trolling habit (hypergraphia) and I will concur with the cage metaphor. The dopamine hits that come with pissing off hundreds of people I'd never met became my own personal drug, and made it difficult to enjoy the rest of life. Addiction eventually becomes the cage, and it gets smaller and tighter over time.

The depressing realization that I come away from this with, however, is that modern life is mostly cages and very few parks. Most corporate jobs are cages with night and weekend release, and so is the way we've designed school systems and institutional life in general. We've even conditioned people into believing in supernatural authoritarianism (which is not to invalidate all of religion; I'm just attacking the politicized, authoritarian strain that exists in the US) because they're so imprisoned that the only solution they can envision is a supernatural person that almost certainly does not exist in that form.

People are so used to living in cages, and have so many weird addictions (whether to drugs including alcohol, to Internet trolling as I discussed, to authoritarian religion, or to the toxic drama of office politics) that de-caging humanity would require massive social change (including, for an obvious line item, basic income).