I’ll get to the rats in a minute. The story actually starts with a recent article on the opioid crisis in Hagerstown. As a welcomed evolution to its sunny lifestyle pieces, in Baltimore Magazine, authors Ron Cassie and Lauren Larocca explored how Hagerstown’s struggling economy accelerated its dystopian challenges, where the biggest draw downtown on Saturdays is sadly the meth clinic. The allusion to Baltimore’s own challenges is hardly lost. Then comes Morgan Eichensehr’s column in this past week’s Baltimore Business Journal, charting lives lost to drugs by Maryland jurisdiction. While Baltimore garners all the statistical attention, Washington County, home to Hagerstown, appears as a rounding error in the body count. Hagerstown would beg to differ.

We’re getting closer to why rats matter. The Baltimore Magazine piece caught Jennifer Vey’s attention at Brookings. In a post this past week, Vey shares her take on the crisis – starkly suggesting that the opioid crisis and economic travails of the communities under its grip reflect “addiction by design”. She notes “the perilous connections between economic decay, deepening despair, and the shocking rise in related overdoses and suicides – in Hagerstown and around the country – have been well-documented.” Vey’s message is clear: poverty and addiction are interrelated. The question is why…

Which gets us to the rats. (You can’t make this stuff up.)The basic premise of the research Vey highlights is that we’re thinking about addiction and its fixes all wrong. In a study, researchers demonstrated that rats in desolate, isolated cages “invariably preferred drug-laden water over plain old tap, those in interesting, fulfilling ‘rat parks’ (lots of cheese, play things and friends), had almost no interest at all in getting high, and few if any overdosed.”

While Vey acknowledges that the rat research has its detractors, there is little disagreement that “environment plays a more significant role in addiction than current policy approaches recognize.” Vey is clear that the causes of drug addiction are myriad. But the reality is we do know who is dying and where, which Vey hopes will allow us to better “examine how the quality and design of our communities might contribute to, and potentially help mitigate, this increasingly dire challenge.”

The design concept of “placemaking” is often seen as hipster gentrification of urban space for a few. But ask the rats whether the design of their community matters to their health. In Hagerstown, through a number of initiatives, they’re focused on reinventing downtown as a place where people can engage and experience life together, hopefully driving economic development that will lift the lives of its citizens beyond the opioid crisis. Placemaking might bring a new coffee shop onto the scene; if done inclusively, it might also help bridge the distance many of us feel from one another. Being from Baltimore, there’s irony in the lessons to be learned from rats: that addiction and environment are ineluctably intertwined. We can’t address the former without solving for the latter. And if we fail, as the rats have shown, we know which water some of the most disadvantaged of us will increasingly choose.

With more than 30 years’ experience in law and business, Newt Fowler, a partner in Womble Bond Dickinson’s business practice, advises many investors, entrepreneurs and technology companies, guiding them through all aspects of business planning, financing transactions, technology commercialization and M&A. He’s the pastboard chair ofTEDCO and serves on the Board of the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore. Newt can be reached at newt.fowler@wbd-us.com.