Imagine living your entire life alone in a cage.
The only time you get out is when an experimenter straps you into a restraining device by your neck and arms. He puts custom-made “shoes” with electrodes on your feet. After he injects you with nicotine or other addictive drugs, he begins electrically shocking you every ten seconds.
This sounds like a horror movie, but it’s real life for monkeys used by an experimenter currently at the University of Florida.
Over the course of the last ten years, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has given $3.4 million of our tax dollars to a researcher named Lance McMahon for these cruel experiments.
Get this – documents show that one of these monkeys suffered through 270 electric shock and drug sessions, whose data was never even used in the final assessment.
During one of the experiments that was not intended to be lethal, one monkey was drugged to death. NIDA should have stopped funding this experiment then, but they can still stop before more monkeys are subject to this torture.
“As a former primate researcher, I would recommend these nicotine experiments be ended. Any potential social benefit is far outweighed by the damage done to these primates.” — Professor John P. Gluck, Ph.D., and NEAVS Advisor
Ending experiments like this is how we begin to stop this injustice and shut down primate laboratories around the country one at a time, for good.