You'd have to be living under a rock to think opioid addiction is anything less than a public health crisis in America--a problem that's reaching truly epidemic proportions, ravaging lives across the country. Addiction is an equal opportunity offender; it doesn't discriminate between young and old, poor and affluent, black and white, straight or gay. Addiction's effects can be utterly ruinous, and public health officials across the country are speaking up in one accord: We have got to do something to put an end to this healthcare disaster.
Lawmakers, of course, have heard these calls--and to their credit, they're doing something about it, in a surprising spirit of unanimity. In today's highly partisan political climate, it's a little bit amazing to note that the CARA Act, which empowers federal agencies to fight the opioid epidemic, passed the Senate with only a single voice raised against it, while the House Judiciary Committee approved bipartisan legislation to combat the crisis just this week.
President Obama, too, has called for crisis-level action to be taken in our nation's crusade against opioid addiction. This includes a request for $1.1 billion in emergency funding.
President Obama's request for additional funding is by no means unreasonable. Here's the rub, though: the federal budget already throws a lot of money at fighting the addiction epidemic, and while some of that money is well spent, far too much is egregiously wasteful.
Here's a good example: pork barrel spending at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), an arm of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which wastes millions of tax dollars testing illegal, recreational street drugs on animals.
How does LSD impact bunny rabbits ($6.5 million, NIH payout: 5R01MH016841)? And how does a female monkey function when she's high on cocaine ($1.3 million, NIH payout: 5R01DA038588)? Hopefully, you have a burning interest in the answers to such questions, because you just paid to find out via your IRS bill last week.
As opioid addiction has reached a crisis level, surely we can all agree that these federal dollars could be better spent somewhere else. Anywhere else.
This is not to say that scientific inquiry into addiction is somehow misguided. It's just to say that all of these studies are tired. By now, the government has tested cocaine, Angel Dust, and crystal meth on mice, monkeys, and other furry friends countless times over (and we at the White Coat Waste Project have the proof). We know drugs are bad for you. Yet the experiments remain on the dole for decades. There is nothing new to be learned here--yet our taxpayer dollars continue to support this senseless waste and abuse, despite no discernible value left to be gleaned.
This all boils down to a simple question, really: Why continue to throw money to tenured college professors who are not facing any kind of a crisis--let alone anything on the scale of the opioid abuse crisis?
But don't take my word for it.
Dr. Cynthia Radnitz, a clinical psychologist with over 20 years experience treating human patients suffering from substance misuse disorders at the Department of Veterans' Affairs Medical Center, in private practice, and an author of seven articles on alcohol and drug abuse in peer-reviewed journals, certainly thinks so.
"Washington, D.C. wastes millions of our tax money testing illegal, recreational street drugs on animals to determine how rabbits respond to LSD and what happens when you give monkeys methamphetamines," she wrote in a recent op-ed. "The results of these tests is predictable, to say the least, and useless for my work."
Dr. Radnitz's testimony echoes what countless other addiction treatment professionals have said--that her work doesn't rely on the data gleaned from animal testing. Not even a little bit.
"I don't rely on data from the animal experiments to guide my clinical decisions for treating human addicts," she writes. "I don't trust that the data from artificially addicted mice and forcibly addicted monkeys translates to my human patients."
It's not just a matter of misguided government spending, though; it's an issue with real moral gravity to it.
"Every tax dollar we spend on this senseless government waste and abuse is one dollar less for addiction treatments we could use in a real-world, clinical setting," Dr. Radnitz writes.
She's right, of course. We need to defund this wasteful spending right now. And we could invest that money somewhere it might really make a difference.
Fighting opioid addiction is a serious problem. Spending tax money to test LSD on bunnies and crack for monkeys isn't a serious solution.