“Johns Hopkins researchers have shown a tendency to cut corners on safety and ride roughshod with experimental subjects—human and animal.”

Drugs, Death, and Denial: Primates Pay With Their Lives

Last year, Science magazine published an article by Johns Hopkins animal experimenter George Ricaurte “saying that one night’s typical dose of the drug Ecstasy might cause permanent brain damage.” The claim was based on the results of an experiment in which Ricaurte says that he injected Ecstasy (also known as MDMA) into the bloodstream of nine squirrel monkeys and baboons; two of the primates died of heatstroke and “two were in such distress that they were not given all the doses.” Critics of the study were skeptical that a typical dose of Ecstasy could be so lethal, since it probably wouldn’t be so widely used if it was. Others questioned the validity of using squirrel monkeys and baboons as models for humans and pointed out that injecting the drug into the bloodstream would likely result in much higher concentrations of MDMA in the brain than if it had been administered orally, which is the way it is normally taken.

As it turns out, Ricaurte’s experiment had nothing to do with the drug Ecstasy. Unable to reproduce his previous findings in an indeterminate number of primates fed Ecstasy, Ricaurte examined the frozen brains of the animals he had killed and says he then realized that he had injected them with methamphetamine (“speed”). Ricaurte, who has received millions of taxpayer dollars from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), claimed that it was a case of mislabeled bottles—“simple human error.” For their part, officials at Johns Hopkins University plan to take no action against Ricaurte, stating, “[T]he researchers’ efforts to investigate conflicting data in the laboratory are an excellent example of how science is self-correcting.”

Human Lives Also at Risk From Sloppy Procedures

In 2001, a healthy 24-year-old woman volunteered for an asthma study at Johns Hopkins University. The researcher conducting the experiment did not tell this volunteer that the drug she would be inhaling was not approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Nor would she ever learn that he “apparently missed some [research] papers suggesting the drug might injure the lungs.” Less than a month after she inhaled the experimental compound, she died of lung failure. The federal Office of Human Research Protection temporarily prohibited Hopkins from conducting research using human volunteers.

What You Can Do

There are perhaps millions of human beings around the world who use Ecstasy and whose brains could be studied through the use of sophisticated imaging technology. In fact, researchers in Florida will soon be conducting the “first FDA-approved clinical trial on the potential therapeutic benefits of MDMA.” There is no excuse for, as in this case, torturing and killing animals in cruel, deadly, unnecessary, and antiquated drug experiments or for brushing aside the suffering endured by these nonhuman primates as nothing more than an “unfortunate” mistake.

Please ask your members of Congress to call on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to do the following:

• Immediately and permanently end all federal funding for Ricaurte and those of his colleagues who were involved in this experiment.
  
  
• Penalize Johns Hopkins University for the deaths of these animals and the wasting of precious research dollars.
  
  
• Investigate how it was that controlled substances such as MDMA and methamphetamine were allegedly “mislabeled.”

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