How to make drugs and feel great about everything. First Spark Media. September 2025
The film ‘How to make drugs and feel great about everything’, by director Journey Wade-Hak and co-producer / writer Keegan Kuhn covers what will be familiar ground to many – the translational failure of preclinical animal studies, the adverse effects of approved drugs, the reproducibility crisis, the suffering of animals in laboratories and the new approaches based on human biology that we should be using instead. These are not easy issues to discuss, but this film about the drug development process manages to do so brilliantly. Somehow it succeeds in getting all the important scientific points across, yet with a light touch, while the excellent visuals and one-liners draw in the viewer without diminishing the gravity of what is being considered. (Upon discovering that ‘over 14000 FDA approved drugs have been recalled in the last ten years’, for instance, Journey notes that this is a level of failure not otherwise seen outside of his Tinder profile.)
Journey suffers from depression and the film begins with his incredulity at learning about the forced swim test; he simply cannot believe that this is considered a scientifically valid means of evaluating drugs for depression. As he learns about this – and many other issues along the way – we see the issues afresh through his eyes. He reaches out to authors of depression studies that use the forced swim test, but none reply. While he easily finds scientists willing to talk about the limitations of pre-clinical animal studies, including several ex-animal researchers, it proves more challenging to track down scientists prepared to defend the use of animal experiments. Journey also hits a brick wall when contacting charities that fund animal experiments – some decline his invitation to be interviewed, others simply do not reply.
Concerned that the picture he is getting ‘might be more lopsided than my youth pastor’s take on evolution’, he is happy to finally interview Dr Paul Locke from Johns Hopkins University. Even Locke, though, while being generally positive about the use of animals in science, is also very clear about their limitations. Then Journey manages to make contact with Dr Deepak Kaushal, from the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and arranges an interview. But just a couple of weeks later, and before the interview could be conducted, Kaushal is found guilty of falsifying animal data in publications and grant applications. Journey doesn’t fare much better with the two representatives of Americans for Medical Progress who agree to an interview. Jim Newman, Director of Strategic Communications for AMP, cites the drug gleevec (for chronic myeloid leukaemia) as an example of successful animal research, but the gleevec story is a classic example of the beauty of in vitro research using human cells, and of how this life-saving drug was almost derailed by animal research.(1) Then – in the context of arguing that animal researchers need support because of the traumatic work they do – scientist Cindy Buckmaster, also of AMP, likens the researchers’ situation to that of war veterans defending their country who ‘know they’re doing the right thing’, but ‘have to kill women and children’. It strikes a very odd note, to say the least.
‘How to make drugs and feel great about everything’ considers the science and ethics of drug development. Not just the ethics of using animals, but the ethics of exploiting the hope and vulnerability of humans in need. It’s well worth watching and beautifully filmed and written. And despite the subject matter, I chortled in several places.
- Pound, P. Rat Trap: the capture of medicine by animal research – and how to break free. 2023, Troubador, Market Harborough, UK. (For the gleevec story, see pages 118-19)
