Animal Justice Project USA has uncovered an epidemic of gross government spending on recreational drug experiments on animals as part of the ‘Deadly Doses: A Legal Low’ campaign. !e experiments in this Special Report are not only of no value to human health, but they have also led (and continue to lead) to countless animals su"ering and dying.

We studied 95 protocols from 21 prestigious institutions including: USC, UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Scripps, Caltech, Yale, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Minnesota, Drexel University College of Medicine, University of Mississippi, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, University of Florida, University of Texas Health Science Center, University of Incarnate Word, Arizona State University, and University of North Georgia.

Non-human primates, rabbits, rats, mice and #sh were the most common animals used, however, the actual number is impossible to calculate as many of the papers studied do not state the actual number of animals involved. Shockingly, rats, mice, reptiles, amphibians, birds and #sh are not regulated in the USA under the Animal Welfare Act [1], which means that in addition to it being legal for them to remain uncounted, anything can be done to them inside the laboratories.

Animals are subjected to forced addiction, and injections into their brains and faces. !ey are dipped in hot water, subjected to electric shocks, and have clamps put on their sciatic nerves and paws to create constant chronic pain. !ey are put on hot plates, starved, and isolated in an endless exercise in su"ering. Non-human primates are forced into restraint jackets and hooked up to stainless steel injection probes which are surgically implanted into their brains. Some of these experiments have been going on for twenty to thirty years and have been duplicated, not only in multiple institutions in the USA, but also in the UK, such as was exposed by Animal Justice Project in Spring 2015 [2].

Researchers who bene#t from government grants to further their careers are subject to no oversight to produce actual results. !e experiments are used to produce papers that can be published and keep these people safely employed. ... At the taxpayers’ expense.

EXPOSED! Deadly Doses Funded with Deadly Dollars: Recreational Drug and Addiction Experiments on Animals

“Mice are not humans, and tests on animals o!en fail to mimic human diseases or predict

how the human body responds to new drugs.” Founding Director Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D,

Wyss Institute

A Special Report by Animal Justice Project USAOctober 2015

At Virginia Commonwealth University [3], non-human primates were forcibly addicted to methamphetamine to determine if they would choose food over the

drug in experiments that took place as recently as 2014. Six male macaques had catheters surgically implanted into their femoral or jugular veins.

!e primates had a customized steel tether and restraint jacket put on them to prevent them from pulling the catheters out. !e drugs were

administered through the catheters in increasing doses over a period of seven to ten days at a time. Funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) grant amounts totalled approximately $1,146,156 [4] over a period of three years.

At UCLA [5], 199 genetically manipulated mice were used in a single experiment. !e mice had a catheter implanted into their

jugular vein and were trained to self-administer Remifentanil (a potent short-acting synthetic opiate). !e mice were given escalating

doses of morphine for six days. !ey were then put into a cylinder which was placed on a 62 Celsius hot plate to measure how many times the

mice jumped or licked their paws. !is was repeated with mice dosed with morphine and a control group. A second group of mice were restrained in cotton

sleeves and had their tails dipped in 49 Celsius water. And a third group of 23 mice had a tube implanted into their brains through which saline, morphine and cocaine was directly injected into their brains.

!e experiments ended with the mice being injected with Etorphine (a drug intended for much larger animals) into their body cavity and being killed 20 minutes later. !is experiment took place during 2014, but UCLA has been conducting this same experiment since 1988.

In another, ongoing addiction study at UCLA [6], 35 male rats, who were only eight to nine weeks old, had tubing surgically tied around the sciatic nerve in their legs to create a state of chronic pain. !e rats were placed in an acrylic enclosure on top of a mesh $oor and their feet poked with sti" #laments using di"erent pressures until they retracted their paws. Two weeks following nerve surgery, the rats were killed and their brains dissected. !is experiment was carried out so researchers could measure dopamine and serotonin levels in animals who were in constant pain.

!e experimenters conclude that additional research is would be necessary to further explore neuropathic pain. NIDA grants totalled $1,425,541 [7] for this project, which commenced during 2014 and will continue until 2017. Similar experiments have been carried out by the same researcher with funding from NIDA for twenty-two years.

Another experiment at UCLA [8] in 2014, involved nearly three hundred rats and mice. Rats had catheters implanted into their lower backs. !ey were implanted under their skin and the catheters protruded out of the top of the animals’ heads. !e mice were held by their tails and Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) was injected also into their lower backs.

Case Studies

!e injection itself was noted by researchers to be extremely painful in the reports. !ese types of experiments can easily produce brain damage and paralysis in the animals, and they o%en do.

!e rats also had their mid-thigh sciatic nerve exposed and ligatures tied around them to induce chronic constant pain. !e animals were then put in an acrylic box with a mesh $oor and their feet prodded with a #ber with increasing force so that the rats were forced to continually withdraw their paws. At the end of this torturous experiments, both the rats and mice were killed. !ese experiments were again funded by NIDA to determine whether NMDA reduces pain responses.

At UC Irvine [9], rats were starved to 85% of their body weight in part to train them to use food delivery levers. !e animals then had catheters surgically implanted into their jugular veins so researchers could inject cocaine into them.

!e rats were divided into three groups where one group would receive cocaine-laced pellets dependent on whether their “partner” pressed the correct lever. !e rats were dosed with cocaine once daily for two weeks in an attempt to discover whether the way cocaine is administered, (i.e. injected or pellet form), has an in$uence on its addictive properties. Some rats did not react as predicted so the data was not included in the end results. Other rats died before the experiment even commenced. Results from this study have no substantial impact on human drug addiction, given that motivational behavior in humans is entirely di"erent to that of rats in a laboratory. !is protocol has been funded with approximately $300,000 [10] for #ve years by NIDA.

In another experiment at UC Irvine [11] during the period of 2013/2014, rats were subjected to a binge regimen of methamphetamine a%er being allowed to run on wheels for three weeks. !e methamphetamine was injected at two hour intervals. !e rats su"ered signi#cant hypothermia as a result and had to be revived.

!is project should have been terminated at the point as the rats had su"ered a life-threatening incident. Instead they were decapitated a%er one week of su"ering in this protocol so that their brain sections could be studied.

!e conclusion of this experiment was that rats who voluntarily engaging engage in exercise are not protected against methamphetamine-induced hyperthermia. !e NIDA funded this

experiment with $252,504 [12] over a period of two years.

In 2014, UC Berkeley [13] researchers received $249,000 [14] from NIDA to inject cocaine directly into the brains of two rhesus

macaque monkeys. A speci#cally-designed electrode was implanted into the monkeys’ brains in order for researchers to inject substances directly into the anterior cingulate cortex. !e procedure is extremely invasive and likely to be excruciatingly painful post-surgery.

!e study was an attempt by researchers to determine whether cocaine plays a role in good decision-making.

Scripps Research Institute [15] is an animal laboratory which receives huge amounts of grants from NIDA. In just one of many examples, Scripps was awarded $375,000 [16] per year for #ve years (from 2011 to 2015), to determine whether female rats would become as addicted to MDMA (Ecstasy) and Mephedrone (MCAT, drone, bubbles) as they did to cocaine.

In one experiment, 54 female rats aged only a few weeks old had catheters surgically implanted into their backs or jugular veins. !e rats were trained to obtain food by pressing a lever. A syringe pump attached to a catheter then replaced food and when the animals subsequently press the lever it delivered a dose of MDMA or Mephedrone. !e drugs were given in increasing amounts until the end of the experiment when the rats are killed and their brains autopsied.

Since 2010, UC San Diego [17] has been given $7 million [18] by NIDA to investigate whether hallucinogenic drugs induced head twitching in mice.

In one experiment, 144 mice aged six to eight weeks old had magnets cemented to their heads. !ey were injected subcutaneously with one of three ‘designer’ psychedelic drugs, including 2C-I, 25I-NBOMe and 25I-NBMD (25I, N-Bomb, Smiles, 25B), and placed into a glass cylinder surrounded by magnometer coils. !eir head twitches were measured for 20 minutes with di"erent doses of the drug. !e conclusion of this experiment was that the three drugs do in fact induce head twitches in mice! !is research laboratory has been given $305,000 per year for 25 years for similar, absolutely futile experiments to determine whether rodents twitch their heads when subjected to ‘designer’ drugs.

NIDA gave $320,000 [19] each year, for #ve years, to UC Santa Barbara [20] as recently as 2014, to examine the impact of female gender and estrous cycles on cocaine abuse. Female rats were hypothesized to have a higher propensity for cocaine abuse than males. Both female and male rats were subjected to the implantation of catheters in their jugular veins, which ran under the skin and out of their shoulder blades. !e rats were injected with a fast-acting barbiturate and rats who appeared unresponsive endured a second invasive procedure involving the implantation of a catheter into their jugular veins. Cocaine was then injected into the catheters and the rats subjected to ‘run tests’. Researchers concluded that gender may not play a role in cocaine addiction.

Stanford [21] received $475,000 [22] from NIH for three years for just one of hundreds of experiments on animals conducted there. Forty eight adult female squirrel monkeys were used in a study on stress. Researchers #rst subjected the primates to brain imaging, then injections of saline and hydrocortisone sodium succinate. !e monkeys were then randomly separated from their social groups, isolated for three weeks, and re-housed with unfamiliar spider monkeys. An unspeci#ed number of the monkeys were then killed so their brains could be analyzed.

!e University of Kentucky [23] was awarded $709,981 [24] in 2014 to determine whether a higher standard of housing and environmental enrichment reduced rats’ willingness to ingest drugs.

Rats were raised from babies to adulthood in either an enriched environment with other rats and objects to interact with, or in isolation. Both groups of rats had catheters surgically implanted into their jugular veins so methamphetamine could be injected. Researchers concluded in this almost million-dollar experiment that environment plays no signi#cant role in methamphetamine addiction in rats.

!e Drexel College of Medicine [25] in Pennsylvania has been awarded over $320,000 [26] by the National Institute of Mental Health for thirty years totalling approximately $6.5 million dollars. One of the studies involved researchers injecting LSD into the brains of rabbits to determine whether it induced an increase in eye blinks and head bobbing.

!e University of Florida School of Medicine [27] has been granted funds for some years now to determine whether methamphetamine abuse results in degenerative brain disorder. In 2014 alone, researchers were granted $330,777 [28] for an experiment involving 36 young mice. Half of the mice had methamphetamine injected into their body cavity and the other half, saline. At the end of a two week period of daily injections, the mice were killed and their brains studied.

Researchers concluded that methamphetamine abuse appears to have a toxic e"ect on the brain. However, as they were unable to determine exactly why this occurred, the study is likely to be repeated. !is same experiment has been ongoing since at least 2010 at a cost to the taxpayerof $1.5 million [29].

In 2015, Charles R. Drew University of Medicine [30] received $405,667 [31] to use mice in nicotine addiction experiments. !e speci#c goals of this research were not only to determine whether there was a signi#cant link between obesity and nicotine addiction, and also to ensure continuous funding for animal experiments on substance abuse. !is research commenced in 2003 and is due to end in 2019. So far, NIDA has provided almost $3.6 million to the facility for researchers to carry out similar experiments.

CONCLUSIONIt is worthwhile highlighting that the listed experiments in this Special Report are just the tip of a very large iceberg. All of these implicated researchers have expansive careers - some spanning decades - studying repetitive experiments on animals.

It is di&cult to identify ANY relevance or applicability of animal experiments to the very real human condition of drug addiction.

As stated, the majority of animals used in these experiments are not even protected by the Animal Welfare Act regulations, and are subject to indi"erence by the research industry. !ese animals are discarded as laboratory waste by researchers. And millions of individual wasted lives, means billions of dollars.

“Settling for the view that illnesses, mental or physical, are primarily genetic allows us to avoid disturbing questions about the nature of the society in which we live. If ‘science’ enables us to

ignore poverty or man-made toxins or a frenetic and stressful social culture as contributors to disease, we can look only to simple answers: pharmacological and biological.”

Gabor Maté, ‘When the Body Says No: !e Cost of Hidden Stress.’

REFERENCES

[1] www.aphis.usda.gov[2] www.animajusticeproject.com/deadlydoses[3] Banks, M. L. and Blough, B. E. (2015) Treatment with Bupropion and Risperidone on Choice between Metham-phetamine and Food in Rhesus Monkeys. Neuropsychopharmacology 40 (9): 2198-206[4] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_history.cfm?aid=8693993&icde=24470611[5] Cui, Y., Ostlund, B. S., James, A., Park, S. C., Ge, W., Roberts, W. K., Mittal, N. Murphy, P. N., Cepeda, C., Kie"er, L. B., Levine, S. M., Jentsch, J. D., Walwyn, M. W., Sun, E. Y., Evans, J. C., Maidment, T. N. and Yang, X. W. (2014) Targeted Expression of Mu-Opioid Receptors in a Subset of Striatal Direct-Pathway Neurons Restores Opi-ate Reward. Nature Neuroscience 17 (2): 254–261[6] Taylor, A. M., Murphy, N. P., Evans, C. J. and Cahill, C. M. (2014) Correlation between ventral striatal catechol-amine content and nociceptive thresholds in neuropathic mice. Journal of Pain 15 (8): 878-85[7] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_history.cfm?aid=8685212[8] Chen, W., Walwyn, W., Ennes H. S., Kim, H., McRoberts, J. A. and Marvizón, J. C. (2014) BDNF released during neuropathic pain potentiates NMDA receptors in primary a"erent terminals. !e European Journal of Neuroscience 39 (9): 1439-54[9] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=8956264[10] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=8956264[11] O’dell, S. J. and Marshall, J. (2014) Running wheel exercise before a binge regimen of methamphetamine does not protect against striatal dopaminergic damage. Synapse 68 (9): 419-25[12] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=8445136&icde=26849298[13] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?aid=8638633[14] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=8638633[15] Creehan, K. M., Vandewater, S. A. and Ta"e, M. A. (2015) Intravenous self-administration of mephedrone, methylone and MDMA in female rats. Neuropharmacology 92: 90-7 [16] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_history.cfm?aid=8773581[17] Halberstadt, A. L. and Geyer, M. A. (2014) E"ects of the hallucinogen 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodophenethylamine (2C-I) and superpotent N-benzyl derivatives on the head twitch response. Neuropharmacology 77: 200-7[18] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_history.cfm?aid=8814189[19] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_history.cfm?aid=8619607&icde[20] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=8720745[21] Lee, A. G., Buckmaster C. L., Yi, E., Schatzberg, A. F. and Lyons, D. M. (2014) Coping and glucocorticoid receptor regulation by stress inoculation. Psychoneuroendocrinology 49: 272-9[22] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=8720745[23] Ho"ord, R. S., Darna, M., Wilmouth, C. E., Dwoskin, L. P. and Bardo, M. T. (2014) Environmental enrich-ment reduces methamphetamine cue-induced reinstatement but does not alter methamphetamine reward or VMAT2 function. Behavioural Brain Research 270: 151-8[24] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=8690806[25] Romano, A. G., Quinn, J. L., Li, L., Dave, K. D., Schindler, E. A., Aloyo, V. J. and Harvey, J. A. (2010) Intrahip-pocampal LSD accelerates learning and desensitizes the 5-HT(2A) receptor in the rabbit, Romano et al. Psycho-pharmacology 212 (3): 441-8[26] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=7534827[27] Butler, B., Gamble-George, J., Prins, P., North, A., Clarke, J.T. and Khoshbouei, H. (2014) Chronic Metham-phetamine Increases Alpha-Synuclein Protein Levels in the Striatum and Hippocampus but not in the Cortex of Juvenile Mice. Journal of Addiction & Prevention 2 (2): 6[28] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=8660098[29] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_history.cfm?aid=8660098[30] Ivey, R., Desai, M., Green, K., Sinha-Hikim, I., Friedman, T. C. and Sinha-Hikim, A. P. (2014) Additive e"ects of nicotine and high-fat diet on hepatocellular apoptosis in mice: involvement of caspase 2 and inducible nitric oxide synthase-mediated intrinsic pathway signaling. Hormone and Metabolic Research 46 (8): 568-73[31] projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_details.cfm?aid=8830954&icde=24647633