In Johann Hari’s book chapter “Batman’s Bad Call,” the author argues that the true nature of addiction to drugs is based on absence of social bonds that people lack nowadays. He describes an experiment where opiate addicted rats were moved from isolated cages with no mates or entertainment to populated cells filled with all kinds of happy social factors.  The goal of this experiment was to establish a social factor within an addiction.

Hari believes that the chemical drug addiction is not as strong as how the traditional scientists think it is. He argues that instead, it’s the absence of social bonds that leads people to fill this void with drug use. The results of the rat experiment showed that the rats quickly recovered from the physical addiction and started to enjoy their new life without drugs. Hari draws a parallel between rats and humans and proves that the main reason of drug addiction is the poor social atmosphere that can be compared to an isolated cage people live in. Moreover, he continues with the attempt to find out how modern society creates these individual cages.

Hari introduces the idea that consumerism plays a significant role in social isolation that leads to drug addiction. He arrived at this conclusion by interviewing numerous addicts and scientists who spent many years working on the problem of addiction.  He uses an example that our global economy supports never-ending consumerism. This environment forces people to constantly buy things similar to rats stuck in an empty cage, who have nothing to do but get more of the drug. Hari concludes that we live in a highly addicted society, and the only way to alleviate drug use is to remove the factors that shattered our historically established social bonds in the first place.