Animals in Research: Groupthink?

My email box overfloweth with references to an article in the Chronicle for Higher Education penned by Lawrence Hansen, M.D., a pathologist at the UCSD Medical School.
Dr. Hansen is an animal rights extremist who came to national attention with a fight to eliminate dog physiology lab classes from the UCSD medical education program. Since that era, he has penned a number of editorials and opinion bits that make it clear he has a more general interest in stopping the use of animals in research.
or…some animals, anyway.

DrugFacts 2010 Repost: Comparing Cannabis and Nicotine Withdrawal

This is Drug Facts Week, an effort of NIDA to promote understanding of the effects of recreational drugs. I have a little bit of interest in such things. Unfortunately, I’ve been a bit busy and will continue to be so this week. So I thought I would get at least partially in the game with a series of re-posts. This post originally went up at Scienceblogs.com on April 29, 2008.

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For some reason many people are in denial about cannabis dependence and wish to assert that there is no such thing, or if there is, it is somehow of lesser importance than is dependence on other substances of abuse. There are many ways to assess importance of course. What gets me going, however, are the assertions about cannabis abuse and dependence that are informed by anecdote and personal experience with a handful of users instead of an understanding of the available evidence.
To provide a little context for todays’ post, I took MarkH of denialism blog to task for his expression of what I viewed as standard cannabis science denialism a fair while ago. In a comment following his post, MarkH specifically identified nicotine withdrawal as being worse than cannabis withdrawal. This is the perfect setup since there are two recent papers which set out explicitly to test this hypothesis. Let us see what they found, shall we?