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In addition to rat park[0], there's also been an amazing study wrt to Viet Nam vets[1]. Only 5% of soldiers relapsed to heroin use in the first year of returning home. Compared to a traditional 90% relapse rate when addicts treated in the US return to their homes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/05/3718949...




This is one reason why 1) some rehab is more effective than others 2) people aren't always encouraged to go back to their home environment after rehab


I find the rat park experiment intriguing, but have there been any further studies or attempts to replicate the results?


From http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/25/against-rat-park/, slightly paraphrased to disambiguate the references. I do highly recommend this blog post if you're interested in the topic.

"Two studies (1, 2) tried and failed to replicate the results. Another two (3, 4) tried and mostly succeeded. There’s some concern that the rat strain involved might have various substrains that the different experiments didn’t control for. But a result that can’t survive a change in rat substrains has pretty dismal prospects for applicability to humans."

[1] http://sci-hub.io/10.2466/pr0.1996.78.2.391

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2616610

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3696469

[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18463628


Exactly what I was looking for, thanks!


Fair warning, this video is pop science and therefore prone to many of its pitfalls, but when viewed in context I find Kurzgesagt[0] did an nice summary of this addiction theory.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao8L-0nSYzg


Ahh yes, this story of Vietnam is also in the book. Thanks for mentioning it. It was also a really powerful anecdote.


Would be intersting to see relapse rates for those doing another tour.




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