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Do you think animal studies are accurate for drug psychology?

slyvan wanderer

slyvan wanderer

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Do you think animal studies are accurate when testing for different psyshcological aspects of recreational drugs?

Such as one test where when the given the option rats (or monkeys) would die because they wouldn't take a break from cocaine while on heroin they would stop to sleep and eat.
 
No. There are moral reasons, that, in general, animal drug studies are disdainful of life. The LD-50 tests are usually ridiculous -- giving animal 100 or 1000x times a dose is kookoo. If you give a person a 100 glasses of water they could easily die. So?

On a pure scientific basis, thre are massive problems, bigger than the moral ones. Animals metabolize drugs differently than people. The situations that animals are in while the drugs are administered are absurd non-naturalistic settings. Just as set and setting are important for human drug users, they also affect animals.

When I was trying to learn about neurology and emotions I was given a very readable and enjoyable book, that hypothesized the neurology of the whole range of human emotions from the study of fear in mice in laboratory settings. Can we say "insane in the membrane"? How does love fit into this? Hope?

Besides these objections, animal studies fail because they do not take into account human beings neuroplasticity. Unlike other animals, most of our development happens outside the egg or womb. Animal studies generally ignore social factors in determing drug activity.
 
First, the interests of scientists using drugs in their research are probaby different than the interests of recreational drug users. Most of this sort of research is funded by the government, which means it is focused on the negative aspects of drug use, or on basic neurological processes that can be studied using drugs.

It's too easy to make blanket statements like "animals metabolize drugs differently than people." That may be true, but nicotine enhances attentional performance in rats, hallucinogens make rats more impulsive, and rats' motivation to self-administer cocaine, even in the face of adverse consequences, increases over time. Yes, this research uses rats, but the rat behavior looks a lot like human behavior.

Performing a cognitive task in a lab isn't "natural" behavior for a rat, but the tests are based on behaviors that rats naturally engage in, or they couldn't be conditioned to perform the tasks. Hence, the measures in cognitive tasks include things like nosepokes into holes, digging, running around, foraging, and other natural rat behaviors.

As to the study of emotions besides fear, research is being done in this area. For example, there is a growing literature on the neural substrates of monogamous pair bond formation in prairie voles.

The point of using rats in research is not just that mean scientists are legally permitted to torture rats in ways that they can't torture humans. The point is that animals are simpler. People who study fear aren't necessarily interested in fear out of sadism. If you are interested in the mechanisms of learning and memory, fear conditioning provides a good model. It allows a person to figure out what is changing in the brain to allow the rat to make a simple association between two things (tone + shock). If auditory and somatosensory information is coming together in the amygdala, you can study the cellular changes produced by fear conditioning, which are likely the same cellular changes that occur in many forms of learning. The chemical machinery that allows this learning to take place has been conserved across evolution, so that fruit flies and humans share a lot of the same learning-related proteins.

I can't understand the statement that animal studies fail because they don't take human neuroplasticity into account. Many animal studies are studies OF neuroplasticity. Animal studies are how we know that there IS neuroplasticity.

It is unambiguously the case that animal studies tell us things we did not know before undertaking the studies. This is a separate issue from whether animal research is morally acceptable or not. Just like the fact that Bush wanted to invade Iraq didn't mean Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the fact that people are morally opposed to animal research doesn't mean that it is "bad science."
 
^ that's funny that you mentioned the pair bonding in prairie voles because that was what popped into my mind first, too. i read a cery well don study on it, and i found it to be pretty convincing.

i took a pharmacology class, and almost all of the studies we looked at had animal subjects and the conclusions were usually cautiously extrapolated to humans. i started out being very skeptical about the validity of such extrapolations, and i still think they need to be taken with a grain of salt, but i ended up the course with a lot more respect for the usefulness of animal studies in the human realm. one of the things we argued about a lot was whether primates have culture and language. kids came up with some pretty convincing stuff, including a study in which primates "paid" juice to view pictures of respected members of their groups (the way humans pay money to read magazines on celebrities and the like) and in which male primates "paid" juice to view pictures of attractive female primates. some case studies demonstrated chimps' ability to use language flexibly (flexibilty/generativity are considered to be what separates human language from basic communication.) granted, none of these chimps had spontaneously developed flexible language. i digress.

it seems like you were questioning the validity/usefulness of doing studies on animals and not the ethics of it. ethically, i think it is wrong because they do treat the animals very badly (cutting rats' heads off at the peak of their high in order to measure the amount of a certain neurotransmitter in their brains, invasive brain procedures on live monkeys, etc) and as narrative pointed out, they are largely endorsed by the government and are "looking" for a certain conclusion, so they're not even that valid anyway.
 
It's true that animal studies can teach us things that we don't know, even things that can be usefully applied to humans. For example, in psychology the theory of learned helplessness came out of Seligman's experiments with dogs. This theory has been shown to have real-world application for humans, especially in education. We wouldn't have the theory without the animal experiments.

On the other hand, a lot of research into neurotoxicity was conducted on animals. But we can't necessarily generalise this to humans. MDMA neurotoxicity, for example, has a different mechanism of action in rats and mice - even in different strains of mice. So it's impossible to tell exactly how MDMA nuerotoxicity might occur in humans, based purely on animal experiments.
 
Depends on the psychological aspect tested, and how it tested. Just like any disease model. We can't come up with good cures for most neurological diseases because we don't have any good models.
 
have you seen the doses they give them, I saw one study that was bashing xtc, but they were administering 150mg/kilogram of body weight, that would be like me taking 15 grams of mdma and complaining its fucking me up
 
150mg/kg? Are you sure. That's going to be leathal to a lot of rats...
 
Good discussion. I'm not 100% against animal testing. If it saves human lives and helps with the science of studying human psychology and neurology, as posters above have mentioned, it shouldn't be discounted.

In the context of quite non-lethal psychoactives, I really don't see the point. It's interesting that Rick Dobson of MAPS has found that monkeys will seek out DMT while in isolation. Earlier behavioursit testing around monkeys and cuddling with faux monkey mamas is interesting. But do we really need to go that route?

> well, you're welcome... but a few things to note... the shulgins are
> chemists, i would believe that they have some idea of the effects and
> toxicity before they take them... additionally, if they did not know,
> would it really be better to give a psychadelic drug or a potentially
> psychadelic drug to an animal against their will in order to see if it is
> deadly?

In fact, Sasha makes a very strong argument in PiHKAL about why he does
not use animals for testing. For one, he finds it immoral to create a drug
and give it to an unsuspecting animal if you are unwilling to take your
own creation yourself. For two, animals are not people, and in the case of
psychedelic drugs, animal tests are more or less useless. How do you
determine an animal is tripping? Shulgin also has a practice he calls
"running up" where he starts with miniscule doses, and works up. Drugs
that are potentially dangerous will exhibit warning signs at lower doses,
and he knows to abandon those. I highly recommend reading PiHKAL and seeing
this in his own words.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Click to expand...
http://www.lycaeum.org/forums/alchemy/Messages/875.html

I tried to find the passage in Pihkal on why Shulgin didn't do animal testing -- what's the point of a 1000x dose of a psychedelic on a rat -- but my organic analogue and digitial processing seems impaired by the heat.

Quoting the quote from above:
In fact, Sasha makes a very strong argument in PiHKAL about why he does
not use animals for testing. For one, he finds it immoral to create a drug and give it to an unsuspecting animal if you are unwilling to take your own creation yourself.
Click to expand...

This is one of my major critiques of pharmo-psychiatry. A friend who works in community mental health & I agree that it is freaking insane for shrinks to be doling out meds without ever experiencing their effects themselves. Doesn't mean that they need to take a med for months or years, but a few days of Prozac nausea or Haldol shakes wouldn't be too detrimental to the docs. Physician heal thyself.

Or at least feel the pain.
 
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BilZ0r said:
150mg/kg? Are you sure. That's going to be leathal to a lot of rats...
Click to expand...

I've seen studies where they gave rats/mice doses that were close to the LD50 (80mg/kg). I can believe the claim of 150mg/kg. I tend to agree with Twacked Out that massive single doses of MDMA may not be good approximations of the effects of multiple lower doses over longer periods of time.
 
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Has anyone ever done @ home rat studies? SWIM needs to do such but has no clue how the hell he/she gonna pull that one off.

SWIM assumes ether would be needed to sedate out the rats for their injections via cotton ball over nose, but would you put an IV plug in the rat, or just administer manually? And where the hell on the rat is the best vein to administer IV? SWIM will clearly investigate rat anatomy but what is the general area where scientists normally administer IV injections to rats?

Also, whats suggested for placebo IV in the control group? Just saline fine?
 
Its WRONG!
Animals should not be used like that
Its something else if it have post-traumatic stress or something then maybe a small dose of some psychedelic could be allright, but NO big doses of any drug on animals without its own intend to do the drug, animals have a right to choose!

Im a great pet lover, and i would not want to see any pet be harmed at the expence of money greedy pharm. companies
 
Thanks for that extremely well thought out discussion. I assume you're a vegan too right?
 
Donbon said:
... animals have a right to choose!
Click to expand...
How on earth do you ask an animal to consent?

"Bark two times if you want me to inject this research chemical into your veins and one time if you don't..." ?
 
Well you can't really let animals choose because they can't give informed consent.
 
In answer to the topic question about whether animal studies are accurate for drug psychology; one would venture a Yes qualified with As Far As It Goes. Many lab rats have been taught to signal when they detect effects from LSD, Mescaline, etc. These rats might be able to identify and screen for potentially 'interesting' agents. They are not, however, going to type out a nice little trip report on Erowid about how agent xyz1 was a crappy ++ with a 12 hour cracked-out hangover, or that 4-AcO-xyz1 was a ++++ that had profound life-changing implications that led them to go back to school for their Ph.D., join a commune, win the Nobel Prize, etc.

As far as basic level research... well most researchers will see the obvious time advantage to cracking rat skulls in search of understanding neuron-dammage in lieu of trying to slip a 50-page Flatliner's gross negligence waiver form past their IRB to allow for similar human experimentation.
 
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