Everything we know about addiction is probably wrong

Put a rat in a cage and give it 2 water bottles. One is just water and one is water laced with heroin or cocaine. The rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself in a couple of weeks. This is our theory of addiction.

In the late 1970s, Professor Bruce Alexander came along and said, ‘well, hang on, we’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It has nothing to do. So, let’s try this a bit differently.’

So, he built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats.

Everything a rat could want is in Rat Park. Lovely food. Lots of sex. Other rats to befriend and socialise with. Coloured balls. Plus, both water bottles, one with water and one with drugged water.

But here’s what’s fascinating: in Rat Park, the rats don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use it. None of them overdose. None of them use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction.

What Professor Alexander did demonstrates that both the prevailing theories of addiction are wrong.

The right-wing theory is that addiction is a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard and you get ‘hooked’ on the lifestyle. The left-wing theory is that it takes you over, your brain gets chemically ‘hooked’ or hijacked. But Rat Park shows us that makes absolutely no sense.

There is another professor, called Peter Cohen, in the Netherlands, who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding.

Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when you're happy and healthy, you'll bond and connect with other people, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatised or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief.

Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be shopping, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. That's what we want as human beings. A bond.

We have created a society where significant numbers of us can’t bear to be present in our lives without being on something, drink, drugs, sex, shopping.

And we are trained from a young age - especially by social media - to focus our hopes, dreams, and ambitions on things to buy and consume. Drug, alcohol or gambling addiction is a subset of that.

Here in the UK, and I imagine in most other developed countries, the amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing since the 1950s, and that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture.

We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been - 33% of Britons aged 16 to 29 reported feeling lonely "often, always or some of the time".

And Professor Alexander, the guy who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery - and it's right to talk about that - but we also need to talk much more about social recovery.

Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a hyper-consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park.