Some things are better together. Cake and frosting. Peanut butter and jelly. Hot chocolate and marshmallows.

Other things should be kept far, far apart. Garlic and ice cream. Hot sauce and brownies.

And now, White Coat Waste Project (WCW) investigators have found another terrible pairing, courtesy of NIDA (the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health), and paid for with your tax dollars: puppies and cocaine.

FRONT PAGE NEWS! Our investigation was featured on front page of The Washington Times on February 2, 2022

In a new experiment we discovered through the Freedom of Information Act, seven 6-month-old beagle puppies were trained to wear a jacket. We know that doesn’t sound too bad — but this wasn’t a normal jacket. It wasn’t a puppy raincoat or a cute dog costume. Instead, this jacket served a cruel purpose: to inject the animal wearing it with drugs.

Through this special drug-injecting jacket, puppies were dosed with cocaine again and again and again for months, along with an ‘experimental compound,’ to see how the two drugs interacted. The experiment, which ran from September 2020 to September 2021 (with a report due May 2022), was filmed, so experimenters could see if the puppies had any “adverse reactions” to the drugs. Prior to being drugged, the dogs were also forced to undergo surgery, where they were implanted with a “telemetry unit” to monitor their vital signs throughout the experiment.

At the end of the experiment, the ‘coke hounds’ were either killed or “recycled” — meaning they were shipped off to be used in other wasteful, cruel, and unnecessary experiments.

We wish we could say this was the only drug experiment on puppies from NIDA that we found, but, sadly, that’s not the case.

A second experiment, which ran from March 2020 until March 2021, also used special jackets to inject beagles with cocaine. Six puppies were used in these experiments.

Why do the same experiment twice? Why even do it once? We don’t know — but what we do know is that you’re footing the bill. These two experiments cost taxpayers over $2.3 million dollars.

These dogs experienced more pain before their first birthday than any dog should have to experience in its lifetime — all for the purpose of writing a report. According to documents we obtained via FOIA requests, the report “may be submitted by NIDA to the FDA” — even though the FDA has said that it does not require drugs to be tested in dogs.

And who’s doing the experiments, and receiving your money? The experiments were contracted to SRI International — the same organization that spent taxpayer money to poison and “de-bark” beagle puppies. Since they didn’t have the correct equipment, however, they outsourced their experiments to Charles River Laboratories — the same organization that “maintains” the monkeys of Morgan Island, so they can be used in wasteful and cruel NIH experiments.