Addicts create their own cages, mental cages., and real cages even. If you put an addict into a nice environment, he will destroy it. ..they seem to be unaware they are doing it, they just automatically destroy until their real world matches whatever mental impression they have of the world

This is dangerous anecdotal quackery of the worst kind.
Science does not support this, and there have been plenty of cases of people with 'good lives' and 'human connections' who have fallen prey to addictions.

Shame on you for writing this rubbish, and shame on HuffPo for giving light to it.

All this is is an article pushing Bruce Alexander's "Rat Park" claims. There's a reason why his studies were rejected for publication by both Science and Nature and he eventually published it in the Psychopharmacology journal, which is largely considered to be pseudoscientific crap.

There were a number of flaws with his studies and he was not backed up by later experimentation, no matter what he and his little group of people continually claim. They're just like any other pseudoscience group, pushing the handful of crap studies they have against the overall scientific consensus.