This article shares the story of Lucy Bryson, who was hooked on crack cocaine and heroin when she was 17, and was working the streets to fund her addiction. Her future looked bleak when she was imprisoned four years ago but a project that builds trust and responsibility in young people by teaching them to work with animals has transformed her…

Drug addicts make poor decisions. These decision-making deficits have been modeled in addicts and laboratory animals using reversal-learning tasks. However, persistent reversal-learning impairments have been shown in rats and monkeys only after noncontingent cocaine injections. Current thinking holds that to represent the human condition…