Action Alert: Help End Drug Experiments on Animals

Can shocking mice through their feet for 15 minutes at a time help us learn whether marital stress can lead to alcoholism? Of course not. Yet millions of tax dollars are being spent on “stressing” animals, giving them drugs and alcohol, and infecting them with diseases in order to study substance abuse problems that are unique to the human species. You can help us end government funding of these inhumane and ineffectual experiments by taking action now.

Recently, $4.3 million was given to researchers to investigate how chronic stress might lead to alcoholism. The researchers decided to “stress” mice and then give them access to alcohol. To create stress the mice were shocked, forced to swim through a water maze, tethered by electrodes drilled into their skulls, and deprived of food. These are certainly not the kinds of scenarios that normally lead to alcoholism in humans.

In other experiments, monkeys were trained to drink ethanol, mice were exposed to nicotine, and squirrel monkeys and baboons were given human-sized doses of ecstasy. After the experiments, the animals were killed. In all, more than 20 million animals suffer in animal experiments in the United States every year.

These studies are absolutely unnecessary. Overwhelming evidence shows that most animal experiments have nothing to do with curing diseases—and they certainly don't help in unlocking the causes and cures of a uniquely human phenomenon like drug abuse.

Many other researches are finding more accurate, more humane, and more affordable alternatives to these pointless experiments. Instead of giving cats the feline version of HIV and injecting them with speed to study the brain-damaging effects of drugs combined with HIV, as one veterinarian was funded to do, other researchers were conducting studies on HIV-positive, drug abusing humans. These researchers used neuropsychological testing and CT scans to identify subtle brain changes, memory gaps, language deficits, mood disorders, and other problems that would never be noticeable in cats.

Other examples of more relevant drug abuse research include:

Massachusetts General Hospital is using MRI and other techniques to assess neural relationships between craving and stress in cocaine-dependent humans.
The University of Washington is using MRI to determine if children exposed to alcohol prenatally have chemical and structural brain damage.
The University of Wisconsin is examining the effects of alcohol on learning.

We don't need more animal experiments to demonstrate that stress or pain can lead to addiction. To learn more about drug and alcohol abuse, we need to address the human factors of abuse more directly. Ethical human studies are far more informative than studies on animals.

However, major research funders haven't made studies like these a priority. Please help us convince the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) to shift their funding focus. Tell them to stop funding inhumane and clinically irrelevant animal experiments for studying substance abuse. Do it for the animals' sake—and ours.

Please write polite letters to these officials, or use our sample letter:

Nora Volkow, M.D.
Director
National Institute on Drug Abuse
6001 Executive Boulevard, Room 5213
Bethesda, MD 20892-9561

Ting-Kai Li, M.D.
Director
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
6000 Executive Boulevard -Willco Building
Bethesda, MD 20892-7003

posted 3/1/06

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