The animal research industry is right that we humans are experiencing an “ongoing opioid crisis”.

But the same industry is flatly wrong when it claims to be helping address the opioid crisis by investigating human opioid use disorder in other-than-human animals. And it knows it.

Researchers are well aware – indeed, they have repeatedly shown – that animal studies cannot be used to model human drug addiction. The reasons for this are varied (though consistent with findings in other areas of animal experimentation). 

Say scientists themselves:

Taken together, scientists have made clear that, not only have animal-studies failed to generate findings predictive for humans, but:

This is consistent with other scientific indictments of the animal research industry, and it follows the same pattern, whereby animal research that is incapable of meeting its supposed goals continues to be funded. 

Given the U.S.’s opioid crisis, huge amounts of money are being funneled into opioid-related animal research even though – and in addition to the scientific conclusions outlined above:

 ➤   It is a “‘well known fact’” that opiates “‘produce different effects in different species’”; 

 ➤   Animal research has “failed to generate a single new category of psychiatric drugs in more than 50 years” (with new drugs on the market being “mostly redesigned or repurposed versions of existing drugs”); 

 ➤   The pharmaceutical industry, in recognition that animal models of “complex psychiatric disorders” (of which addiction is one) are not predictive for humans, has “drastically reduce[d] [its] funding of research that relies on such models to develop novel pharmacotherapies….”; and 

 ➤   There are “many human drug addicts who could be clinically studied and helped, sparing the need for addicting new subjects….”

Yet, instead of changing course, publicly-funded institutions like the University of Connecticut continue pursuing and using limited resources to fund unethical and ineffective — though, of course, self-servingly lucrative — exploitation of other-than-human animals. 

By way of telling example, Animal Partisan has unearthed and shared with Rise for Animals records and videos of a 2023 University of Connecticut experiment that relied on shooting up mice with oxycodone, forcing them into physical withdrawal, and, then, watching them suffer. 

In a claimed bid to help stem the opioid crisis, the University of Connecticut did the following: 

1. Purchased from Charles River Laboratories genetically-modified, inbred mice from a strain known as C57BL6. This strain “originated with a pair who were mated in the [1910s or 1920s]” with the failed purpose of erasing “individuality” from these living beings. Indeed, recent scientific findings about the social behavior of these animals are being ignored by animal researchers even though they “ha[ve] potentially significant implications for research” and serve as an “important reminder that a lab mouse is more than a ‘model’; [he/she] is an organism in [their] own right. And the unnatural limits of the lab constrain their behavior.”

2. Injected these mice with increasing doses of oxycodone twice daily for eight days to induce addiction. Forcing drugs into animals’ systems fundamentally and critically contradicts human initiation of drug use, and, thereby, immediately handicaps this kind of animal-based addiction research.

3. Tested their addiction via “Conditioned Place Preference (CPP)”. CPP is an “experimental procedure” understood at least four years prior to the University of Connecticut study not to model addiction (but, rather, to model “substance reward, instrumentalization, and non-addictive substance use”).

4. Injected the addicted mice with a ketamine metabolite and naloxone (to precipitate withdrawal); and, then, placed them “individually in a clear plexiglass box” for observation of “symptoms of withdrawal, including the number of paw tremors, rearing, grooming, jumps, writhing, and hind limb scratching….”. 

The infliction of this “agonizing” physical suffering in furtherance of, at best, pseudo-science is rendered even more perverse by the University of Connecticut’s pre-existing knowledge. 

As its researchers wrote in the study publication itself, the University of Connecticut undertook this study knowing that:

• “FDA-approved treatments for opioid use disorder” were already “available” . In the U.S., there are “multiple highly effective medications used to treat opioid addiction”, as well as long-known “tools” that are highly effective at preventing overdose deaths” (i.e., methadone and buprenorphine). However – despite the “overwhelming”  evidence supporting the use of methadone and buprenorphine – these “[e]ffective prevention and treatment strategies . . . are highly underutilized across the United States”, and their use is being “obstruct[ed]” by “virtually every sector of American society” . . . to the ill-gotten benefit of the animal research sector. (It is estimated that “barely one-fifth” of “Americans with opioid use disorder receive medication – and tens of thousands have died for lack of it”. Further, the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse has “estimated that if methadone and buprenorphine were made universally available nationwide, opioid overdoses would fall by half, if not more”.)

• Trials on humans — yes, clinical trials! — had already supported the use of ketamine for opioid use disorder. (As an interesting aside, the University of Connecticut itself has undertaken human-relevant drug addiction experimentation that generated “results . . . at odds with some of the findings from experiments on animals”.)

• Even the study’s purported value was limited by many fundamental factors, including the precipitation of withdrawal (which is not the same as spontaneous withdrawal or natural withdrawal processes) and limited drug exposure (which does not reflect more complex addiction behaviors seen with extended drug use).

Because here’s the bottom line for the self-perpetuating animal research industry: even though this study harmed animals, wasted precious resources, and denied human-relevancy, it served the animals researchers’ most immediate professional interests by, in their own words, “open[ing] the door for future experiments….”

Like addiction, this harmful cycle must be broken. And, it can only be broken through the taking of strategic, compassionate action and the closing of doors known to lead to harmful outcomes.

You can help both the other-than-human animals trapped in labs and the humans battling addiction by writing to your Senators in support of the newly introduced FDA Modernization Act 3.0, which seeks to require the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to implement the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 by establishing regulations for the validation and acceptance of non-animal, human-relevant research methods.

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