Addiction, is it contagious?

Addiction. A heavily loaded word that we all feel is somehow deteriorating the entire fabric of our own society each time you say it out loud.?

The Miriam Webster definition of addiction is:

"A compulsive, chronic, physiological or psychological need for a habit-forming substance, behavior, or activity having harmful physical, psychological, or social effects and typically causing well-defined symptoms (such as anxiety, irritability, tremors, or nausea) upon withdrawal or abstinence the state of being addicted."

But my question is; is it the substance, behavior or activity that's addictive in itself, or is it the environment in which a person is that causes them to prefer doing this thing over the alternative; so not doing it.

If we factor in "the alternative", many people that I've met and that are dealing with serious addictions, for them "the alternative", is sometimes often worse than the consequences of their addiction.

Rat Paradise

To give a concrete example with rats, and then illustrate how the same happened with humans in real life, I'm sharing the famous "Rat Park" experiments from 1978.?In a nutshell, addiction research before this experiment had trialed the addictiveness of heroin or cocaine on rats, locked inside a cage/small rat box, all alone and given the two alternatives of 1. water, or 2.water laced with heroin.?Because the depressed and lonely rats were choosing to drink the heroin water in their box, they often overdosed on it so we concluded that heroin is addictive, dangerous and anyone will take heroin over anything else if they are given the chance.

Then came American psychologist, Dr Bruce Alexander with the idea of testing what would happen if he made the perfect rat utopia.?A paradise for rats, where they had toys, partners to reproduce, play, food and more than enough space for all the rats to live in a happy rat community.?This experiment was nicknamed "rat park".?Then inside this rat paradise, Dr. Alexander would also place two water bottles, one with normal water, and one bottle laced with heroin or cocaine.?What Bruce discovered was that the rats rarely chose the drug laced bottle. When they did, it was intermittently, rare and no overdoses happened. ??This proved that "the alternative", was a strong factor in determining the addictive behaviours.?

Human needs

How this was directly demonstrated by humans, was during the Vietnam thousands of American troops had become addicted to heroin. It was supplied and readily available as pain relief, and tests indicated that about 20% of all troops had become addicted.?I can imagine, that being in a foreign land at war, wondering if you will survive another day, makes "the alternative" quite challenging.?Similar to the lonely rats in a cage, these humans became addicted because of the environment they were in.?So, when these heroin addicts were asked to provide urine samples back in their home countries a year after being back, only 5% of the heroin addicts were still addicted, whereas 95% had quit without any rehabilitation or anything.?The only difference was that their environment had changed entirely.

What should be done?

Addiction doesn't necessarily only relate to these mind altering substances.?Gambling, pornography, gaming, sex, social media and smartphone addictions are all well documented and on the rise.?Anxiety, depression and suicide is also on the rise, are they related?

As the "environment" we're living in is slowly becoming a hybrid between "in real life" and online, we find ourselves living in strange paradox (or rat-box?).?Where we might feel like the online world is supposed to make us feel more connected, but is in reality making us feel more disconnected and alienated than before.?This rush of dopamine might be masquerading a series of deeper emotions such as loneliness, anxiety and depressions.?The exact emotions those lonely rats had in their small boxes.?So how do we create a paradise for humans, or a human park? How do we make "the alternative" better??That's the million dollar question I'm working on with my team at Zario.

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