It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views?
The RP experiment wrt morphine addiction in mice has not been replicated. Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results and found that they confirmed his hypothesis. It's not a good way to do research. The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiments should be discredited for the same reason. Because their results were tainted by their designer.
Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proofs. That mice wouldn't become addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.
>the Milgram experiments should be discredited for the same reason
Actually, the original hypothesis Stanley Milgram had was that Germans were somehow predisposed to obedience as a culture or race. His studies in the United States were what's called a "pilot test" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_experiment) conducted to verify if everything was working as expected. Once he had some control readings for Americans, Milgram planned to go to Germany and conduct the real experiment.
Milgram, and virtually all of his colleagues, believed that nobody would obey until the end of the study. He polled his colleagues, and the highest number ANYONE gave was 3%.
If you're not familiar with the Milgram experiments, take a minute to read up on them. Roughly 60% completed the experiment, obeying orders until the end.
For what it's worth I think you're wrong about conducting science, maybe right about the rat park, but don't bring the Milgram experiments into it. They are possibly the most valuable result science has ever given us.
According to Gina Perry, she has found clear evidence of cheating in one of Milgram's 23 experiment series. It's of course possible that the other experiments were carried out properly but I think one bad apple spoils the whole bunch in this case. Even if other experiments arrive at similar results it doesn't change the fact that the original may be tainted.
> had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results
That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out:
"The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions." -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
(That the experiment has not been replicated as you claim could be a bad sign, but that's a separate matter.)
I think what the parent means is that a motivated experiment designer can (even accidentally) create an experiment that has a high false-positive rate, thus providing very little Bayesian evidence given a positive result. Ideally, you'd have the experiment designed by someone who actually wanted to falsify the hypothesis (or at least a neutral party), such that the non-null conclusion, if arrived at, would be really strong Bayesian evidence.
This is subtle but important distinction. It is absolutely possible to do a confirming experiment that can give misleading results. There is a nice explanation in the wikipedia article under "Confirmation Bias".
A striking example is the (2,4,6) test. From wikipedia:
"Wason's research on hypothesis-testing
The term "confirmation bias" was coined by English psychologist Peter Wason.[66] For an experiment published in 1960, he challenged participants to identify a rule applying to triples of numbers. At the outset, they were told that (2,4,6) fits the rule. Participants could generate their own triples and the experimenter told them whether or not each triple conformed to the rule.[67][68]
While the actual rule was simply "any ascending sequence", the participants had a great deal of difficulty in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific, such as "the middle number is the average of the first and last".[67] The participants seemed to test only positive examples—triples that obeyed their hypothesized rule. For example, if they thought the rule was, "Each number is two greater than its predecessor", they would offer a triple that fit this rule, such as (11,13,15) rather than a triple that violates it, such as (11,12,19).[69]
Wason accepted falsificationism, according to which a scientific test of a hypothesis is a serious attempt to falsify it. He interpreted his results as showing a preference for confirmation over falsification, hence the term "confirmation bias".[Note 4][70] Wason also used confirmation bias to explain the results of his selection task experiment.[71] In this task, participants are given partial information about a set of objects, and have to specify what further information they would need to tell whether or not a conditional rule ("If A, then B") applies. It has been found repeatedly that people perform badly on various forms of this test, in most cases ignoring information that could potentially refute the rule."
Yes their rules might be more specific than the general rule, but that is not a problem. Their rules were a correct subset of the more general rule (if what you are describing is accurate). Now if they are claiming a broad hypothesis and only providing a set of data that asserts a subset of the hypothesis, that is a problem. They are being misleading one way or another. If the researcher is presenting a hypothesis and misses out on data (for whatever reason), then somebody else will (ideally) point this out. Nonetheless, just acting like this misrepresentation can happen therefore don't trust some particular study is little more than baseless criticism.
They tested the hypothesis that heroin is addictive by itself, the one supported by the self-administration experiment, and got pretty unexpected results. As far as the scientific method is concerned, their experiment looks ok to me.
It's interesting to note that the criticism of the Rat Park experiment uses exactly the same reasoning Rat Park designers used against self-administering experiment, namely that one of seemingly innocuous parts of experimental setup (isolation and genetic variance respectively) was causing a major results bias.
I guess that's one way to interpret the phrase "designed to confirm," but it's also a fairly natural way to describe a legitimate test. I might, for example, say that I "designed an interview process to confirm that candidates are qualified," and of course it's clear that the process will either confirm or deny.
The issue is that there's a conflict of interest when the same person who proposed the hypothesis is the same person attempting to prove that hypothesis. This sort of bias is why meta-analysis exists.
Real life experiments with drug decriminalization and other factors such as varying rates of addiction tied to life circumstance provide circumstantial support that addiction is at least not entirely chemical.
"Liberal drug views" in general seem to have a lot of real world support, while hard-core punitive prohibitionism has been a failure in every way pretty much everywhere it's been tried... that is unless your goal is to imprison a large number of people, perpetuate cycles of poverty and crime, and route lots of money to the prison and police/security industries. In that case they're a big success. At this point I consider prohibitionism to be a crackpot view. I get the sense that with at least some people prohibitionism is supported as an indirect way to persecute minority groups. It was true back when the "war on drugs" was pursued, and I think it's still true today.
There are cases where certain liberal positions do not have real-world support and basically don't work, but this isn't one of them. None of our over-arching political bias frameworks (right, left, etc.) jive perfectly with reality.
> lso, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results and found that they confirmed his hypothesis.
Uh, what? This is the definition of science.
> Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proofs. That mice wouldn't become addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.
So says you. Also, extraordinary claims require the same proof as any other claim, that oft cited quote makes no sense. Labeling something 'extraordinary' inherently shows that you have a bias, not the person questioning the claim.
An extraordinary claim is a claim with a low prior probability. Observation of various approaches to drug policy and the associated levels of drug addiction don't seem consistent with the Rat Park hypothesis being an extraordinary claim.
If the rats had prefered the morphine solution it would have suggested the hypothsis was false, so it was a reasonable experiment. If other labs attempted the same experiments and were unable to reproduce the same results that would discredit the original but a lack of attempts to reproduce the results does not say anything about the original.
> It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views?
Are there people who have liberal views on drugs because they don't believe that addiction is real or that drugs are often harmful? I have views about drugs which would probably be considered liberal, but they have nothing to do with whether drugs are addictive or harmful.
> That mice wouldn't become addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.
Is it? I've never known anyone who has claimed to be addicted or even exposed to morphine. Having observed no actual evidence myself, why is one claim that morphine is addictive any more extraordinary than another claim that morphine isn't addictive?
> Having observed no actual evidence myself, why is one claim that morphine is addictive any more extraordinary than another claim that morphine isn't addictive
You haven't observed, but people in the Law and Health professions have and do on a regular basis. There have been plenty of studies on it. All consistent with its addictive nature. Your lack of personal experience does not make each side equally likely. One is clearly more consistent with reality, and the other is not. Thats why one claim is extraordinary, and the other is not.
I've seen several critical opinions of Stanford Prison and Milgram, and they laid out all their objections. Do you have a link to something that lays out specific objections to the way Rat Park was conducted?
I lived in an apartment where 6 out of 8 apartments were occupied by alcoholics or drug addicts.
Nearly every block on that street was the same. This was Glasgow, and the drug of choice was heroin, although everyone also smoked as much marijuana as they could afford. These people's lives weren't particularly shit on a day-by-day basis, but they had nothing but misery on the horizon. If they had kids they would lose them, they would never work, never be praised. They'd never see the world. Most of them hadn't been outside Glasgow for years, if not the whole of their lives. They would probably never go to the beach or on even the shittest package holiday. Those who were obviously junkies (struggling to walk, sunken faces and destroyed skin) were basically seen as an underclass by everyone from their peers, to the rest of the population and the police.
But there were people living in the same street, in the same apartments, with far less money, working shitty jobs, who weren't even open to taking drugs. The structure of this area wasn't bad at all - it could have been Rat Park, if it wasn't filled with drug-addicted rats who just pissed in the common areas and threw their rotting food out of the window.
I don't have any great insight here - but I think there's more to it than environment as suggested by this study. There are people all around the world who live in far worse conditions and who aren't turning to substances, even when they are available.
My feeling is that rats living in cages, who can see rats living in Rat Park would be more likely to seek addiction. And perhaps even more so if they see other rats being moved from cages to Rat Park, but not them. I don't know if rats could understand this concept though, which might be why they aren't all living in Afghanistan's poppy fields.
It's important to note that people’s environment is heavily influenced by their social circle. Day to Day a poor person that has a strong social circle and some free time to sit around and play cards can be happier than say an elderly widower who might have plenty of resources but few friends or family left alive.
IMO, Rat Park would have been far more interesting if they had presented rats with identical environments but the difference being social isolation not just living in a tiny cage.
> I don't have any great insight here - but I think there's more to it than environment as suggested by this study. There are people all around the world who live in far worse conditions and who aren't turning to substances, even when they are available. My feeling is that rats living in cages, who can see rats living in Rat Park would be more likely to seek addiction. And perhaps even more so if they see other rats being moved from cages to Rat Park, but not them.
To a certain degree it comes down to a semantic argument about how you define environment.
* Just the structural physical environment - nice benches, and trees, flats that are a decent size, and don't have mould on the walls, etc
* this plus the consequences of other people on the physical environment - needles left in parks, shouting in the corridors, people pissing in the lift
* this plus the immediate social environment - you are treated badly because you look like a drug addict
* this plus the cumulative internalized values that you have picked up from your social environment throughout your lifetime - other people living successful, prosperous lives around you, or in mass media, and you falling short of your expectations
Rats don't necessarily have the latter two, at least I don't think they have a social stigma for drug addiction!
For humans, the parallels are inevitably to some degree limited, because you can't just take someone out of their own mind, and put them somewhere where they feel good about themselves, although you can try, and will succeed with many.
I suspect it's not all environment, but this study argues that environment (and social realities, etc.) are a significant component -- it's not just a matter of chemical dependence only.
I think the basic question are "loosers" made or born. That is, does someone with a bright future try drugs and then spiral down the shitter as is commonly portrayed in media and government anti-drug propaganda. Or, does someone who is a fuck up, failure at life, find themselves in the shitter and start using drugs to avoid their looser life.
I'm sure, as in most things, the reality is a gradient between those extremes. But it sure seems majority only believe / see first extreme.
I knew someone once who'd used heroin for a while and gave it up and he told a similar story. He said it "makes the pain go away," and I asked what he meant and he just said "all of it" and smiled. He said I'm in horrible, horrible pain and have no idea because I'd never tried heroin before. :O
I remember talking to somebody in the medical industry once. I don't remember exactly what his job was, but he told me that he had done some work with opiate addicts. Supposedly, their brains themselves can get so powerfully addicted to the drugs that it actually generates phantom pain in order to force the user to get more opiates to make it go away. Every test they can run shows that the addict is actually feeling real pain, but there is absolutely nothing physically wrong to cause it. The idea that the brain can work on that level, actually causing artificial sensations to trick our conscious mind, is both amazing and scary.
The mental pain of existence, all existential issues, all of it fades away before you've even removed the needle from your vein. I always described heroin to those who ask about my experiences as "blissful apathy in a needle".
And yes, I've been clean for three years, but whenever I'd go through withdrawals every single nerve ending would be on fire and I'd be hypersensitive to pain. It's an interesting phenomenon. Part of that is caused by your brain downregulating it's own endorphin receptors, as you're providing it with something else that's much more powerful: you take away that stimulus and it takes your body and mind a while to adjust and upregulate those receptors again.
Forget physical pain. Opiates make the mental pain, the pain of existence go away. Stress, business problems, finances, it's all manageable with opiates. Most people don't know just how much better human existence can be with a bit of tweaking to our chemistry.
We accept we're no longer in our ancestral environment, why can't we accept that our default chemistry is suboptimal?
I don't think that's accurate. Certainly some people work jobs just to get cash to pay bills. But plenty of people create for the fun of it.
Our brains operate suboptimal because we can not control their state. We get worried when it provides no benefit. We get sad and troubled when we shouldn't. We experience intense pain with no way to shut it off. We lose focus, even when we really want to concentrate.
Everyone should have the capability and choice of modifying their brain chemistry on demand. Your premise that people should be forced to be unnecessarily unsatisfied because some of them might go on to do great things is cruel.
>>Our brains operate suboptimal because we can not control their state.
This is backwards, our brains are us.
>>We lose focus, even when we really want to concentrate.
This is a microcosm of the dangers involved, in modifying brain chemistry. Consider things like hyperfocus or working straight on amphetamine leading to shit code.
>>Our brains operate suboptimal because we can not control their state.
Many of the things you want can be achieved well by a machine or somebody without emotion? Do we want this?
>>Your premise that people should be forced to be unnecessarily unsatisfied because some of them might go on to do great things is cruel.
Its hard to decouple satisfaction from drive, and willpower - we have rather blunt instruments and current drugs build real dependency problems making it almost impossible to stop. Today's drugs don't do what you are talking about.
My wife said something similar about morphine: "Did you know your hand hurts really bad while you are just standing there right now? You have no idea until you have morphine and it gets instantly better."
That's really interesting. I imagine nociceptors have a baseline firing rate but your brain tunes it out because it's just noise. If you switch that off, the current filter system would get whacked out of balance, you'd feel awesome, but when it switches on again, baseline firing would be a salient input for a bit and you might notice it? Of course, long term up/down regulation of various receptors occurs too, but I've never heard of this particular effect before though it sounds plausible to me.
I wondered a while back if (theoretically) taking some kind of non-harmful but pain stimulating compound might not make you feel awesome the rest of the time, and might even be good for you by recalibrating your inflammatory response and such.
If you've ever wondered why people on hard drugs like to take off their clothes when they're coming down, this is it. You can't handle the sensory overload of your t-shirt against your skin.
Hard drugs isn't a category of drugs, but powerful opiates seem to be what's included anyways. I'm not aware of opiate users habitually taking off clothing. Other powerful drugs can make you feel cold, adding clothing. Some people really sweat on acid, which is probably a decent cause of taking off clothing.
>I used to torture some of the people I sold drugs to by asking them if they knew why they got out of bed in the morning. "Why do you get out of bed every morning?" I would ask. Most didn't have any idea. When they realized this, I would pounce: "I know why I get out of bed," I'd say, almost imperially "it's because I'm sick as shit and need to do a shot." So there.
And from the first comment:
>In spite of my immediate delight with heroin and vow to use it as much as possible, it took over 6 months, and really closer to a year, of consistent use before the body became physiologically addicted. That said, addiction is rarely only physiological in nature. More often than not, it is caused by social factors.
The /r/opiates subreddit seems more accurate on opiate usage. Don't get things wrong, it can be terribly addicting. But for many users, that's not really a bad thing by using, any more than needing to pee more is considered by coffee fans.
Extended release opiates are a huge lifesaver though, allowing you to wake up without feeling like torture incarnate.
As a corollary, I remember trying opium whilst on a nice long career break overseas, and being frankly pretty underwhelmed.... and then considering whether I might have thought otherwise if I'd had any source of stress or dissatisfaction in my life whatsoever at the time.
[of course the alternate hypothesis is that what I was being supplied with wasn't opium, but I prefer the first one...]
Holy cow, what a terrible website. Hijacks the back button, scrolling is so over-sensitive as to be useless, the left and right perform in non-intuitive ways, and the animations all have a delay before they start.
Further, scroll a few pages using your scrollwheel, then press the right key. You'd expect to continue to the right, but instead are scrolled all the way back to the left to page #2. Eesh.
From near the bottom:
"Some further studies failed to reproduce the original experiment's results, but in at least one of these studies[12] both caged and "park" rats showed a decreased preference for morphine, suggesting a genetic difference"
Still, it's an intriguing result. The reviewer comments from science and nature would make interesting reading - too bad they are not public.
But also, from the immediately preceding paragraph: "Several later studies did appear to confirm its findings — for example, Bozarth, Murray and Wise in 1989, also published in Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior — but nothing came of those either."
That paints a confusing picture, so without looking at the specifics of the later studies for possible differences, I think it's hard to come to a conclusion.
Wikipedia isn't so good when it comes to drug related topics. Or rather, it is atrocious since the linked study (http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/HOUSING.html) arrives at the completely opposite result Wikipedia claims. It's an interesting read because it also discusses why setting up a study to fairly measure voluntary drug intake among groups of mice is very hard.
After reading portions of that study, I find it hard to make meaningful comparisons across them. The cited source's two conditions seem to be fairly close in many respects IMHO:
"The first group was housed in individual stainless steel cages (18 x 25 x 18 cm) that prevented tactile and visual contact among the rats."
"The second condition consisted of rats housed in groups of 10 in a large stainless steel cage (45 x 101 x 39 cm) that permitted social contact; these rats displayed normal play behavior, dominance struggles, and social grooming."
Okay, one rat in 450 cm^2 vs 10 rats in 4545 cm^2, both in steel cages. Compared to Rat Park, which was 8.8m^2 (close to twice the size), and was specifically not a steel cage[1]. Then again, I doubt this study was done specifically to confirm or refute the earlier experiment, but to test further hypotheses in the same area.
Rats are social creatures so you can't just measure the area of their habitat divided by the number of inhabitants. The experiment setup would be analogous to humans living either in prisons or in solitary confinement.
In my previous comment, I cited another study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract) that also failed to replicate RP. That time the flaw of that replication was possible inadvertently introduced strain differences among the mice. It's always possible to find some variable that is different and therefore claim that the result isn't relevant. I'd imagine that's one big reason why replication efforts is so uncommon in the scientific community.
Btw, BK Alexander has had over 30 years on him to setup a new Rat Park, have it monitored by other scientists, and prove once and for all that his original results weren't just "a fluke."
Puts me in mind of a study a few years back where they had socially housed monkeys self-administer cocaine [1]. Like all primates, each group of monkeys ended up with a dominance hierarchy. The most dominant had a relatively nice life compared with the subordinates: more grooming from others, more play, more attention in general.
It turned out that the subordinate monkeys were much more susceptible to the temptations of cocaine. In contrast, the dominant ones were able to resist its allure a lot more effectively.
The researchers also looked at the neurobiology of the monkeys. Before being socially housed, they were kept in individual cages for a couple of years. They looked at the main pleasure centre of the brain and measured the level of dopamine receptors (of the D2 type) present there. These receptors are directly stimulated by naturally occurring rewards like social activity, food, sex, and so on - but also stimulant drugs like cocaine.
All the monkeys had pretty much the same D2 receptor level when they were cooped up in single cages, with little variation. But when they were socially housed, the D2 levels of the dominant monkeys rose significantly higher; this too was associated with their lessened vulnerability to cocaine.
So it seemed that social environment can have quite the effect on the neurobiology of one's reward pathway, and potential for drug abuse (as the Rat Park experiment suggested).
On reward pathways - in human stimulant addicts you also see lower D2 receptor levels than in non-addicts [2], although this is lacking a comparative reading from before they were addicted, so we don't know if that's near the state they were in when they started abusing the drug. Having said that, in non-addicts there is a natural variation in D2 receptor levels, and those with less D2 enjoy stimulants a lot more [3], just like the subordinate, lower D2 receptor monkeys.
Unlike Rat Park, however, all the above is based on stimulants, which directly affect the aforementioned receptors. Whereas morphine takes a more indirect route, with different receptor types, so it's not quite comparable. Still, interesting to think about how much we may be slaves to our neurobiology, and our social surroundings.
Diacetylmorphine is still used in several European countries as a front line analgesic. Other forms of morphine are widely used for pain relief on a prescribed basis all over. If it is as simple as using morphine addicts you to morphine, why are no much wider swathes of the population addicted to it?
I don't know that it's purely environment, but there's plenty of evidence out there that seems to suggest it's more than simply chemical dependency.
My impression was that basically the only country that uses heroin for pain relief is the UK, and even there it is basically only used in cases where addition is not an issue, e.g. terminal cancer patients.
A decent amount of air ambulances polled use diamorphine. I'm pretty sure (but unfortunately having difficulty sourcing) regular ambulances have it available as well.
It's widely used as palliative care in the UK as well, as you pointed out - but it might be worth noting that's not it's sole use, and palliative care doesn't always mean they're going to be dying soon enough that addiction wouldn't be a harmful issue to deal with.
(I heard that discussion discussed on the Adam Carolla Show from the 10th. I'm guessing it's a hot topic at the moment due to Hari promoting, I think, a book)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7743089
It comes up a lot, maybe because the result is kind of positive and aligns well with HN's crowds drug liberal views?
The RP experiment wrt morphine addiction in mice has not been replicated. Also, afaik, Bruce Alexander had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results and found that they confirmed his hypothesis. It's not a good way to do research. The results of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiments should be discredited for the same reason. Because their results were tainted by their designer.
Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proofs. That mice wouldn't become addicted to morphine is most certainly an extraordinary claim.