Debates about drugs and addictions at an international seminar.

Professor Emeritus Bruce Alexander, from Simon Fraser University (Canada), who became known worldwide for conducting an experiment called “Rat Park”. In this experiment, Alexander sought to break with the dominant paradigm that, once in contact with drugs, animals became incapable of living without them. He offered drugs, entertainment and freedom to one group of rats and also drugs and confinement to another group.

After observation, the scientist found that, among other facts, free rats consumed 19 times less drugs than caged ones. More recently, in 2010, Professor Alexander published the book "The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit" by Oxford University Press. In this work, the professor radically rethinks the nature of dependence. In addition to Bruce Alexander's studies, the seminar also brought together Brazilian experts on the subject to discuss the issue of drug addiction and its implications for the various areas of public policy, such as regulation, prevention and treatment.

Professor Bruce Alexander began his speech by discussing the limits of prohibitionist logic in order to reduce suffering related to drug addiction scenarios. Bruce rescued the faces of the strong religious sense on the topic that stigmatizes drugs as something prohibited and the source of all problems in society. According to the professor, this type of vision ends up making invisible other social problems that exist in the society in which the subject is inserted and that go far beyond the drug itself.

The professor ended his contribution by stating that drug addiction is characterized by the loss of control, when one can no longer choose, and this loss of control has multiple determinations: biological or social.