We humans have learned a lot about drugs from experimenting on rats. In this episode I discuss the findings of those experiments, and I show (yet again) that the war on drugs is designed in a way that ensures as many people as possible will struggle with addiction, and that their addictions will be as bad as they could possibly be. We couldn't design a less effective system if we tried (and I do in this episode).

To read more about the mechanisms of dopamine's action and how dopamine aids in the learning process, check out the Frontiers article, "A New Paradigm for Training Hyperactive Dopamine Transporter Knockout Rats: Influence of Novel Stimuli on Object Recognition."

To learn more about Rat Park, check out Maia Szalavitz's book, Unbroken Brain, or my book Dr. Junkie.

To read more about B.F. Skinner's so-called "Skinner Box," which showed that rats given random doses of food will press the lever more than those given consistent doses, check out this Simply Psychology article.

For more on why punishment make addiction worse, check out Maia Szalavitz's work.

For more on how changing our setting can cause our tolerance mechanisms to fail, check out this article from The Journal of Psychopharmacology

For statistics regarding drug arrests, see The FBI Uniform Crime Report.

Cigarette smoking numbers come from The American Lung Association, “Overall Tobacco Trends,” and CDC Data: “NHIS 1974-2018.”

Music on this episode from Pixabay. 

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