[dalbasal]

My apologies. "Replication crisis" (or Ted Talks, really) strikes again. I should have said "demonstrated," though that's probably a cop out.

From the wiki article and its meta research source, it seems that researchers do support the general idea that housing, enrichment and social conditions affect addiction. Popular science has just overstated the results.

"While the Rat Park studies did not use methods that are reliable by current standards, enrichment has been shown to reliably reduce opioid consumption and this effect can generalise to other drugs of abuse."

https://journals.helsinki.fi/jrn/article/view/10.31885.jrn.1...

Incidentally, I don't understand why stuff like this is still ambiguous. This is a classroom experiment, resource-wise. Why hasn't it been refined, replicated and conducted at scale sufficient to be reliable?