Who lives in a park? Who lives in a cage?

Thanks to blogs of David and others from Wired In, I am slowly getting familiar with the current situation in drug policy and services in UK and I read the debates around its expected transformation with a lot of concern. As I understand it (and correct me if I am wrong…), the situation has reached the point when methadone treatment is applied as a number 1 choice for heroin users who may then stay on the substitution for a long time without any (or only small) additional support.


In Czech Republic, we experience a different situation, partly because of the fact that heroin is not as popular here as in UK and partly because of the fact that not many practitioners or psychiatrists are actually willing to prescribe any kind of substitute drug. But it seems that the general direction goes towards more methadone and Subuxone prescriptions. I do not think it is bad but it needs to be followed by efficient and improving ways of recovery. Apparently, the problem starts when these approaches are seen as binary oppositions. Then, this „treatment“ x „recovery“ controversy would remind me of similar contradiction between a cage and a park.


The famous experiments with rats in a cage with access to unlimited source of heroin or cocaine are well known. A surgically implanted catheter was hooked up to a drug supply that the animal self-administered by pressing a lever. Their increasing consumption of the drug was used as an explanation for the assumption that the drug is causing the addiction which is progressive and leads to death.


Professor Bruce Alexander, a Canadian psychologist from Simon Fraser University, tried similar experiment, but with an alteration. He did not place the rats into a cage, but into an „Eden“ for rats: it was a place 200 times larger than the cage, there were cedar shavings, boxes, tin cans for hiding and nesting, poles for climbing, and plenty of food. Also, because rats live in colonies, the „Rat Park“ housed sixteen to twenty animals of both sexes. Bruce Alexander put there two bottles: in the first one, there was plain water, in the second one, there was a morphine-laced water.


The results were very clear: unlike rats in cage, the rats in park preferred the plain water to the morphine. The modification of this experiment was that the rats had access only to the morphine water for some time.After several months, a bottle with plain water was added and the rats in the park were more likely to switch to the water! „Addiction“ did not seem progressive, chronic and untreatable any more. More importantly, it seemed that it is not the drug that induces the addiction.


People do not live in cages. But we do not even live in parks. However, in some conditions, life can look like a cage, the same as life can look like a park. Since drugs, as heroin or cocaine, may be the only possibility how to cope with life in a cage, in a park, it is one of the many options. And what needs to be said: people are not at the same distance between cage and park. But even if some are caught in a cage, many of them find their way to the park.

Obviously, we want to help people who are in a cage. As I see it, methadone makes the life in cage less stressful. Recovery is a way from the cage.
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source: http://pavelwiredin.blogspot.com