NZ - Legal highs to be tested on animals

[poledriver]

Testing on prioners is a terrible idea, and I have a hard believing that this is a sentiment anyone can really express truthfully.

Why is it such a terrible idea? Some prisoners might enjoy the chance to test 'human' recreational drugs, they'd have a choice.

Animals don't get a choice. If it was for beneficial medicine I wouldn't have any issue with the testing. Did you see the poll results? Most people are against the testing of this kind of thing on animals, so what's your idea of something not so terrible?

 

[psood0nym]

Why is it such a terrible idea? Some prisoners might enjoy the chance to test 'human' recreational drugs, they'd have a choice.

I attempted to answer this in my last post by saying:

In order to be of predictive value practical inquiries into the pharmacology of a drug need to define the parameters of its effects. That means killin' things or otherwise testing their limits of tolerance.

Who would volunteer for that? Humans only get involved after animal tests. For pharmaceuticals at least, first experimenters test tolerance levels on humans with solid health for levels of accepted tolerance (they try to produce unwanted side-effects) because these types of people are least likely to die in trials. Then they test on the population the drug is intended to treat.

Even when human tolerance is being tested it's not anything like the extreme tests of tolerance in animals. It's tests meant to answer (effectively): "how high of a dose can we give before chronic diarrhea happens?"; "how high a dose until a human refuses more because it makes them really dizzy or want to jump out of their skin with anxiety?" Those are practical tests. There's not going to be tests that involve getting people anywhere near enjoyably high for years on end then scanning to quantify grey matter reductions and the like to evaluate the long term effects on a population at recreational levels. That's way too expensive and impractical. That kind of evidence comes a decade latter when there's junkies that have been using for years "beyond the recommended dose and frequency" as it were.

On top of that, with recreational drugs usually the "effective" dose is much closer to an overdose than the dosage of a traditional drug intended to treat a disease or symptom. Look at DXM's cough suppressant dose compared to recreational dose for instance. You really can't reliably push the doses of a recreational drug in a way that's useful for assessing risk without expecting to kill a lot of people. The poll results about animal testing are immaterial because the only tests that are practical and are even remotely legal to conduct are on animals. Either animals are tested on or random untested drugs are made accessible to the general population like grey market RCs are today, which would entirely defeat a major purpose of regulation.

 

[poledriver]

Who would volunteer for that? Humans only get involved after animal tests.

If I were in prison I'd volunteer to test new recreational drugs.

He would. I'm sure there's be others, even if you don't think so.

According to the poll, more people do not wont testing on animals for legal highs in NZ by a considerably amount of responses. So why not on humans (who have been the test subjects already), you have answered for what you believe in and that's fine.

In a new bill, Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne outlined procedures for testing "legal highs" on animals so that the products can be sold in New Zealand stores again. Legal highs are psychoactive drugs intended for recreation, not for curing or preventing illness.

The bill recommends performing toxicity tests on small animals such as rats over a six to 12-month period. Toxicity testing generally involves administering drugs or chemicals to animals by force feeding, inhalation, injection, or on the skin to determine immediate reactions and lethal doses. This causes great pain to the test animals, who are usually killed at the end of the testing period. New Zealand currently tests 300,000 animals per year, and the legal drug tests would add to this number for a completely unnecessary cause.

There is no reason for legal highs to be sold on the New Zealand market, as their use is purely for cheap recreation. Administering painful tests and killing animals to sell these products is unjustifiably cruel.

 

[psood0nym]

^The poll results about animal testing are immaterial because the only tests that are practical and are even remotely legal or semi-safe to conduct are on animals. Either animals are tested on or random untested drugs are made accessible to the general population like grey market RCs are today, which would entirely defeat a major purpose of regulation (making safer recreational drugs).

 

[poledriver]

Wasnt there a town somewhere that was unknowingly tested with LSD somehow back in the day? If we as humans are going to use these RC for recreational value, and not medicinal purposes then I cant see why we cant test them on ourselves. Why do it on animals.

 

[psood0nym]

Wasnt there a town somewhere that was unknowingly tested with LSD somehow back in the day? If we as humans are going to use these RC for recreational value, and not medicinal purposes then I cant see why we cant test them on ourselves. Why do it on animals.

Again. Because there's no way to get useful predictive information about the safety of a recreational drug in any way that's remotely safe or legal to test on humans. If some town somewhere was unknowingly tested with LSD the experiment in no way was meant to assess LSD's safety! Such a test is irrelevant to the concerns of regulation. Scientific assessment of safety is a major purpose of regulation, and regulation is what's at hand in New Zealand.

The purpose of developing alternatives to recreational drugs that are safer is not to get people high with a different compound (what would be the point of that?). That's not the moral question at play here at all. It's to prevent the harm that otherwise would be caused by existing illicit recreational drugs. It's to prevent human deaths and misery by causing animal deaths and misery in an informative way first. Got it? This aspect of the purpose is exactly what the animal rights advocate in the article (Carter) was blatantly ignoring as has already been noted above.

Frustrated emotions surrounding the necessity of testing on animals are maybe getting in the way of understanding the situation? I don't know. I don't like it either. But its one more shitty reality of a world with human civilization. Accept it. What you're asking for to spare the animals in this case is tests on humans like were conducted in concentration camps in World War II.

I get where you're coming from, I think. You want a mostly unregulated legal recreational high market where an adult is free to buy a new high, and if if fucks them up that's their responsibility -- no need to bring animals into the mix. I agree in principle, but the repercussions are never simply isolated to the individual who makes that totally unfettered choice to get high. In New Zealand the conditions of legalization are that the tests must occur if a drug is to be legal. The alternative of this not happening now is a return to the conditions of prohibition, with all the harms ensuing in the interim that that entails. Either way undeserved suffering happens: in the form of the animals tested on or the collateral human damage of prohibition caused by criminal enterprise and law enforcement. Choose your shit sandwich.