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Drug trials on animals, seen from behind a Jain pharmacy counter

Hetal Shah Contributor
· 5 replies · 113 views
Animals & environmentIndianJainismMahavira#ahimsa#animal-testing#complicity#pharmacy-ethics
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I run my family's pharmacy in the old city of Ahmedabad and I grew up Jain. Every few weeks a customer, usually an older Jain auntie, asks me whether a medicine was tested on animals. The honest answer is nearly always yes, somewhere along the line, because regulators have long required it.

Ahimsa, as Mahavira taught it, extends non-harm to every living being, down to insects. So the question is not a trivial one for us. But I also watch people come to the counter in real pain, and I hand them medicines that work because someone, some time, tested them on mice and rabbits. I don't believe the right answer is to refuse them.

Some things I have found useful. The 3Rs principle (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement), proposed by Russell and Burch in 1959, at least gives a direction: replace animal tests where possible, use fewer animals, and cause less suffering to those that are used. And anekāntavāda, the Jain teaching of many-sidedness, reminds me that the auntie, the patient and the researcher each see a real part of the truth.

But I still don't know how to think about complicity. If I sell a medicine developed through harm I did not cause and could not have prevented, am I part of that harm? Is the patient who takes it?

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5 replies

  1. Omar Farouk

    Fellow

    As a physician I lean on a principle from Islamic law: necessity makes the forbidden permissible, al-ḍarūrāt tubīḥ al-maḥẓūrāt. It is not a blank cheque. The jurists insisted that necessity is measured strictly and permits only as much as it requires. But it does mean a patient taking a medicine to save their life is not doing wrong, whatever its history.

    What it does not settle is whether the research itself was justified. That is a separate question, and a better one to press.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Anand Pillai

    Fellow

    Hetal, the Jain texts may make this harder for you, not easier. Classical Jain ethics speaks of harm done in three ways: doing it yourself, causing it to be done, and approving of it when done. So complicity is built in. Approving of harm, even after the fact, is not neutral.

    But intention and passion carry great weight in the karmic account. Handing over a medicine to someone in pain, with no approval of the harm and a wish that it had not happened, is very far from the harm itself.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    On Replacement, things are moving. Organoids, organ-on-a-chip systems and computer models are getting good enough that regulators are changing. In the United States, a 2022 law removed the requirement that new drugs be tested on animals before human trials, though in practice most still are. The pressure your aunties put on you is part of what pushes this along.

  4. Tsion Bekele

    Fellow

    One more side for your anekāntavāda. When animal testing is reduced, more of the early risk shifts to human volunteers, and in my experience they are often poor and sometimes far from the countries that profit. In Ethiopia we have argued for years about how to make consent meaningful in trials. Moving suffering is not the same as removing it.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Hetal Shah

    Contributor

    Thank you all. Anand is right that our own texts make complicity harder, and Tsion is right that the suffering can move to people with less power. So here is where I am. I can't escape the history of the medicines I sell. I can refuse to approve of it, I can tell the aunties honestly what I know, and I can support the research that will make the question smaller. That is not purity. It may be the many-sided answer.

    Helpful · 2