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Rat Park

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Re: Rat Park

#51

Post by baddox »

spb wrote: post #24
shutupalready wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 experime…

The problem is designing an experiment to confirm the hypothesis rather than to test it.

"Test" just means "confirm or deny."

Re: Rat Park

#52

Post by Dylan16807 »

baddox wrote: post #51
spb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is designing an experiment to confirm the hypothesis rather than to test it.

"Test" just means "confirm or deny."

Some experiments are designed to "confirm or deny", while others are designed to "confirm".

Re: Rat Park

#54

Post by [deleted] »

bjourne wrote: post #16

I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park page came up on HN: 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 experimen…

[deleted]

Re: Rat Park

#55

Post by cthalupa »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #49
cthalupa wrote: post #25

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 th…

Really? Which countries are those? 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.

I might have been mistaken on several countries - I can only find sources for it's use in the UK

But it is used by first responders as well:

http://www.sjtrem.com/content/22/S1/P15

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.

Re: Rat Park

#56

Post by baddox »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #52
baddox wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Test" just means "confirm or deny."

Some experiments are designed to "confirm or deny", while others are designed to "confirm".

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.

Re: Rat Park

#57

Post by MichaelGG »

stefantalpalaru wrote: post #42
MichaelGG wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Suboptimal in what way? We create, develop, improve because we are unsatisfied, not because we are happy.

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.

Re: Rat Park

#58

Post by cloverich »

baddox wrote: post #50
bjourne wrote: post #16

I'm just gonna be lazy and link to what I wrote the last time the Rat Park page came up on HN: 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 experimen…

> 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…

> 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.

Re: Rat Park

#59

Post by bjourne »

kbenson wrote: post #43
bjourne wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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."

Re: Rat Park

#60

Post by girvo »

ufmace wrote: post #17
api wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Immediately made me think of this great old sci-fi story: http://bestsciencefictionstories.com/2009/05/17/desertion-by...

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…

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.

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