Bruce Alexander

      

            Bruce Alexander’s findings on drug addiction are startling and are taken with
skepticism because society is deeply rooted in the belief that drugs are the cause for addiction. Humans are told that no other factors are significant enough to debunk this belief. A brief summary of the drug experiment suggests that when in an isolated area, rats were more likely to become addicted to drugs. On the other hand, rats that were in a “rat-park” had the freedom to roam around. The interesting part is that these rats stayed away from drug-treated water. The environment played a huge role on which water the rat was drawn towards. The hypothesis of the findings state that drugs do not start nor intensify the addiction. Instead, addiction to drugs can be attributed to the environment, rather than the drug itself.

               The findings show that an individual’s environment is a factor when it comes to drug use and addiction. The environment should not be disregarded when analyzing drug addiction. People never take it into serious consideration because of what they have been told their entire lives; drugs cause addiction. When told this particular belief as kids, no one has the audacity to challenge the mainstream belief. The Wire supports this observation and the findings of Bruce Alexander. Although The Wire is a fictitious TV show, it brings light to a part of America that has been in the shadows and it tries to portray life as close to reality as possible. Environment plays a huge role in the way the characters see themselves. Middle school kids selling drugs is the norm because their environment forces them into these roles. This life is all that they know. This is similar to the rats that were isolated in cages. They had nothing to do in isolation and the experiment gave them two options: drink untreated water or drink water laced with drugs. Sure enough, the rats who lived in an environment that mocked a more natural setting were so distracted with their normal living patterns that they showed no interest in the laced water. Both The Wire and the rat experiment reveal that an environment limits the amount of knowledge one has of life and life outside of that knowledge does not exist because it is not their reality.

               After analyzing this information and tying it to The Wire, humans have to ask themselves: are individuals being pacified by the nation’s elites? Are people told to believe certain ideas in order to place them into roles that enhance some sort of untold caste system? How much of what humans believe in today is actually rooted in the truth? Are the lives that people live limited by the cages that society has set up? The answers to these questions are not simple and most likely will never be answered with 100% certainty. What is learned is that individuals should be active critics of the surrounding world and cannot limit themselves to the dictations of their environment.