One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat
experiments – ones that were injected into the American psyche in the
1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America.
You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage,
alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water
laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment,
the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming
back for more and more, until it kills itself.
The advert
explains: “Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory
rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It’s called
cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you.”
But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander
noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage
all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen,
he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built
Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and
the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends:
everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know,
will happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both
water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what
happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn’t like
the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a
quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While
all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the
rats who had a happy environment did.
Yep. Addiction starts and ends with pain. Portugal and Spain proved this when they classified drug use as a medical condition and not a crime.
The exclusive US trailer debut of the Studio Ghibli film “When Marnie Was
There,” feauring the voices of Hailee Steinfeld, Kiernan Shipka, Kathy Bates, John C.
Reilly, Geena Davis, Ellen Burstyn, Vanessa Williams and Catherine O'Hara.
The movie, based on the Joan G. Robinson novel and directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (The Secret World of Arrietty),stars Hailee Steinfeld
as the voice of Anna, a girl sent from her city foster home to live in a
small sea town. Feeling like an outsider in her new digs, she becomes
bewitched by another youngster named Marnie (Kiernan Shipka) and they find a connection although Marnie seemingly can’t leave the surroundings of her old mansion residence.
The film opens in New York and Los Angeles on May 22nd 2015 before a national expansion.
The average American believes that the richest fifth own 59% of the wealth and that the bottom 40% own 9%. The reality is strikingly different. The top 20% of US households own more than 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% combine for a paltry 0.3%. The Walton family, for example, has more wealth than 42% of American families combined.
