A friend of mine recently forwarded me this article: The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think about this book: ‘Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs’
I read the article, and watched the TedTalk, and have yet to read the book (currently on request at the library). The article is about the causes of addiction and quotes a study called Rat Park conducted in the 1970s by Bruce Alexander PhD. (See the full study here). With out reproducing the whole article, essentially Dr. Alexander found out that rats addicted to cocaine or heroin living in a bare cage that were then transported to a cage with lots of activities, exercise, other rats to socialize with, good rat chow, basically a “Rat Park,” abandoned their addiction. Fundamentally, “he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage.”