What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine: A Philosophy of Addiction

📘 Book Overview:
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What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine: A Philosophy of Addiction
By: Hanna Pickard
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In this video, I explore Hanna Pickard’s powerful and challenging book What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine? — a work that asks us to completely rethink what we believe about addiction.

The title comes from a famous experiment where rats, isolated in a cage with only a cocaine lever, repeatedly pressed it until many died. This image became a cornerstone of the “addiction is a brain disease” model. But Pickard shows that when rats are given connection, play, and meaningful alternatives, they overwhelmingly choose those over drugs.
This leads to a radical conclusion:

Addiction is not simply about hijacked brains — it is about human lives, pain, isolation, trauma, and meaning.
Pickard proposes a new way of understanding addiction that is:
Humanistic — grounded in psychology, relationships, and personal history
Heterogeneous — recognizing that different people become addicted for very different reasons
Ethical — allowing responsibility without blame, and care without stigma.

Rather than seeing people with addiction as broken machines, Pickard treats them as agents — people using drugs for reasons: to cope with grief, trauma, self-hatred, fear, loneliness, or despair. Drugs become not just chemicals, but solutions to unbearable inner states.

The book also challenges the idea that calling addiction a “brain disease” automatically reduces stigma. In many cases, it actually increases shame, hopelessness, and the feeling of being permanently broken — making recovery harder, not easier.

This video is for:

People in recovery
Clinicians and therapists
Anyone interested in psychology, addiction, or mental health
Anyone who has ever wondered why people keep using even when it hurts

If you want to understand addiction not as a defect of the brain, but as a story of suffering, survival, and human choice, this book will change how you see it.

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#Addiction #Recovery #MentalHealth #Psychology #Philosophy #HannaPickard #Trauma #Sobriety #BookReview #Healing