Politics

Welcome to Rat Prison, USA

This is why we’re dying

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We could make a big list of America’s many severe problems — mass shootings, rising suicide rates, income inequality, environmental degradation, the obesity crisis, substandard schools, violent crime and everything else — and make an even bigger list of all the individual programs we could start and fund to address them.

Or, we could attack all these problems at the root.

Am I suggesting all these disparate problems are caused by the same thing?

Sort of. Not totally. There is no way to turn any place into a utopia unless we invent magic.

But we’ve been attacking each problem individually for years, and life has just gotten worse.

Instead, let me remind you of Rat Park.

You’ve probably heard about this famous : Rats placed in boring cages — a rat prison, essentially — and given access to drugs did drugs constantly and overdosed.

But rats put in a setting that made rats happy, while still given free access to drugs, weren’t even interested in getting high. They led their happy rat lives and none of them died of drug overdoses.