I am co-author of the report and represent Animal Justice Project in the U.S. First, the group involved is Animal Justice Project, not Alliance. Secondly, the information in the report is a matter of public record and is available on the NIH website and PubMed, which can be found here.
The statement made by Marc Rolph was completely arbitrary. We are specifically discussing recreational drug addiction experiments on animals. Where are the cures and advancements that he is talking about? Where are the actual results that help human drug addicts?
To make such a sweeping statement as to suggest that doing away with rats in research would “do away with advances” makes no sense. Extrapolating results from mice and rats to humans does not work. Over 95 percent of drugs tested on animals do not work in humans and never reach the market because we have entirely different biological systems. The ex-director of the NIH, Dr. Elias Zerhouni stated, “We have moved away from studying human disease in humans. We all drank the Kool-Aid on that one, me included. Researchers have over-relied on animal data. The problem is that it hasn’t worked, and it’s time we stopped dancing around the problem.”
The fact is that hundreds of privileged academics have made their careers being funded for years by taxpayers to experiment on rats and mice that have no oversight.
