Page 23 of Rat Park
“I started young.”
“Any other reason?”
“Like?”
“You’ll have to tell me.”
“I don’t know. I started when I was fourteen or something. Fifteen. Wouldn’t anybody get hooked?”
“We’re not talking about anybody else. I’m asking you—why didyoubecome addicted to drugs?”
“And I already told you.”
“Because you started young.”
“Yeah.”
“So it’s chemical.”
“Well. The addiction part, yeah. Obviously I didn’tstarttaking drugs because of the chemical dependency or whatever, but that’s why I became addicted.”
There was a slight pause. “Did you know, in the Vietnam war, twenty percent of American troops deployed to Vietnam used heroin regularly. We can probably guess why most of them started. And, chemically, of course, their bodies grew as dependent on the drug as yours or mine. Yet, when the war ended and they came back, how many of them do you think continued to use heroin or a similar drug?”
“I don’t know. Fifty percent?”
“Good guess, but it was five percent. Five percent remained addicted or using. Ninety-five percent stopped without professional help.”
“Okay, so, what? I’m so royally fucked up that—”
“I’m going to stop you there,” Ian said gently but firmly. Dominic’s mouth clicked shut. “This isn’t about being, as you said, ‘fucked up’. Let’s put aside the fact that some people are more genetically or physiologically predisposed to develop addictions, which can also play a part. What we have to understand is what a person seeks out of the experience of being high, and why some people can become more dependent on this. Let me tell you about another experiment.
“Originally, addiction, like you suggested, was seen as just a physiological dependency. Rats were put in a cage with a water bottle filled with water, and another with water laced with cocaine. Experimenters found that the rats would consume the drugged water until the point of death.”
“Well, that’s fucked up for the rats.”
“Yes, I’m afraid lab rats don’t have the best of lives,” Ian said with a tilt of his mouth.
Dominic snorted.
“However, a few years later, someone developed another experiment. They constructed something they called Rat Park. A large, open cage filled with other rats which could socialise with each other. When these rats were offered the laced versus unlaced water, most of them did not become dependent on the drugged water. What can we extrapolate from this?”
“That when you’re put in a cage with nothing better to do, you’re gonna turn to cocaine, no matter the consequences?”
“Exactly. And, most of all, that solitude is intolerable, that even simpler creatures will seek to escape it. That it is not so much down to the individual but to the circumstances they are reared and live in that will cause them to turn to whatever it may be that helps them escape it. Do you see any parallels in your own life and this conclusion?” Ian asked.
Dominic looked down at his hands, clenched around each other in his lap. “Yeah. I guess.”
“Everybody needs bonds to survive, Dominic. That’s not down to you, your nature, or how fucked up you may or may not be. That’s human nature.”
Dominic huffed out a breath. “All right. I get what you’re saying, but how does that help menow? It’s too late for me.”
“Too late for you, how?”
“Because, because—okay, if when I was a kid or whatever, if I’d grown up in Rat Park instead of a loveless cage then, yeah, maybe I wouldn’t be an addict, but it’s too late now. This is who I am now. I can’t—it’d be selfish, to try to make bonds now.”
“Selfish?”
“Yeah. Selfish.”
