Who Pulled The Plug? –
September 21, 2019 – This drove him to start researching addiction eight years ago, not realizing that research would turn into a 48,000-kilometre trip around the world, looking at the impacts of drug addiction and how different government policies impacted addiction rates. “I wanted to sit with people whose lives had been changed by addiction, by the drug war, by alternatives to the drug war. And I just learned that so much of what we think we know about the subject is wrong.” As part of his research, Hari spent a lot of time in downtown Vancouver, and it was there that his perspective on addiction really began to change. He learned of the “Rat Park” experiment done by psychologist Bruce Alexander that looked at what causes addiction. The experiment concluded that it was not just the drug itself that causes addiction — although the body’s response to the chemical is part of it — but that a lack of social connection is the biggest factor.
