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The Most Dangerous Drug in the World
Considering intervention for the addicts in our lives
Dr. Philip Zimbardo died in October of this year. If you don’t know his name, he was a renown Stanford professor best-remembered for conducting one of the most potent (and controversial) experiments on addiction in the history of psychology.
The experiment took place in August of 1971. Zimbardo used human subjects, because this particular kind of addiction seems to affect humans most strongly, perhaps only affects humans. No other animal would suffice. Zimbardo didn’t dose his subjects with any pharmaceutical. What he did was create the conditions for some of his subjects to get high, and watched how that made them treat the other subjects in the experiment.
If you don’t know by now, I’m referring to the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo and his team built a mock prison in their laboratory, randomly assigning male volunteer subjects to the role of either prisoner or guard. From a baseline of random subjects, all deemed to be in adequate physical and mental health, the real impacts of the high could begin to show. Zimbardo wrote:
“It is important to remember that at the beginning of our experiment there were no differences between boys assigned to be a prisoner and boys assigned to be a guard.”
