Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: Greens drug policy 2: the animal testing problem

Brent Jackson

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 12:15:12 +1300

It also amuses me that the entire point of many medical drugs is to kill animals.

Good point.

Moz

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 13:10:32 +1300

whether the Greens would ever be willing to compromise on zebrafish.

Here was me starting with the question "Do The Greens/the law understand that people are animals". Viz, does the law clearly explain that only testing on non-human animals is prohibited? It's obvious, but that doesn't mean it's in the…

linger

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 10:50:18 +1300

There’s a huge difference between “a drug you expect people to take” = a drug that people will choose to take regardless of what you think, and “a drug you expect people to take” = a drug that you are recommending a patient should take. “You” (ultimately the government) have…

BenWilson

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 08:03:12 +1300

why would the standard of safety for a drug you expect people to take be different depending on their reasons for taking it?

I'm going to break with tradition and not explain why. I weighed up the cons and found that there were only cons. It felt like something was…

Thomas Lumley

Sun, 11 Dec 2016 13:08:00 +1300

Another interesting question is whether the Greens would ever be willing to compromise on zebrafish. These are used a lot in biological and biochemical research as a step between cell cultures and mice — partly because they're transparent when young, but also because they're small, cheap, and about as cuddly…

Thomas Lumley

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:39:45 +1300

could you use existing evidence for, say, cannabis or MDMA?

I’d say so. I mean, if MDMA were legalised I’m sure there’d be lots of interest in research on the more subtle or longer-term health effects, but we must know about as much about short-term safety risks as we would…

Rich of Observationz

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:14:40 +1300

- There is no middle ground between the government jailing people for selling or using a substance, and the government asserting a substance to be "safe".

– The PSA explicitly excluded all proscribed substances (except analogues) from ever being approved. This removed from consideration a range of substances that have…

Russell Brown

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 11:12:15 +1300

That is, it’s not a disaster if huge swathes of THC analogues gets turned down by a computer, but it would be a pity if that happened to a new class of diabetes treatments.

Good point. I'd been trying to form a thought around that, and that's it.

The other…

chris fowlie

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 11:11:10 +1300

Thanks for getting clarification here that controlled drugs such as cannabis might be part of a PSA-like law, rather than the PSA itself, which is currently fatally flawed (in part due to themselves!). The major issue for me is that the PSA takes a medicines approach which is not warranted…

Thomas Lumley

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 11:04:57 +1300

I'd be worried about teratogenic effects without animal testing — which seems to have been the initial sticking point for the 'rodents only, ie, not rabbits' version of Psychoactive Substances animal testing.

One difference between medicinal and recreational drugs is that we might be willing to tolerate a lot more…

Public Address

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 11:04:57 +1300

Discussion from blog post.