THE CAGE OF MODERNITY: THE "RAT PARK" EXPERIMENTS AND THE HISTORY OF ADDICTION

Abstract

This thesis reconstructs the cultural, political, and intellectual influences that made Rat Park conceivable for Bruce Alexander in 1970s Vancouver. Alexander’s research built upon a twentieth-century tradition of analogizing humans to rats, yet it reversed the assumption that learning occurs under deprivation by replacing laboratory cages with a rodent “utopia”: the enriched environment of Rat Park. Under these conditions, addiction appeared not as neuro-physiologically predetermined but environmentally constituted. I propose that Rat Park’s methodological divergence challenged punitive policy, as Alexander redefined addiction as an adaptive response to politically produced deprivation. Rat Park had limited uptake in its immediate aftermath until the experiments were canonized in the early twenty-first century leading to renewed interest in policy circles. This thesis argues that, despite Rat Park’s successes, Alexander ended his career dissatisfied because he understood Rat Park not as a politically operative model but a thought experiment demonstrating the futility of drug policy.