Flutterby™! : Rat Park

This is fascinating: MeFi: Rat Park and Other Children's Stories talks about the work of Bruce Alexander in trying to replicate the "rats will feed their addictions into starvation" experiments, showing that if you give them interesting environments, rather than just little cages, they'll actively avoid the drugs, and wean themselves off of morphine even when they're physically addicted

The assertion being that we're not addicts because of the substances, we're addicts because our environments are untenable.

I haven't explored the links too heavily yet, I actually have work to do today, and Bruce Alexander's The Globalization Of Addiciton is seventy bucks, but there's definitely some learning in this direction I want to do.