1975 Golden Fleece Award for Studies on Behavior of Drunk Fish, Rats

Is a fish or a rat more likely to get into a bar fight after having too many drinks? We may never know.

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism tried to answer this question, spending millions of dollars over many years to find out if drunk fish are more aggressive than sober fish and if rats can become alcoholics.

It’s unclear if they ever did, but in 1975, Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave the agency one of his Golden Fleece awards for wasteful and nonsensical spending.

That year, Proxmire lamented the continuous spending.

“Over the years, NIAAA has spent literally millions of dollars in hundreds of experiments to turn normal rats into rodent ‘lushes’ with little or no success,” Proxmire was quoted as saying in The Vidette, a local newspaper in Indiana.

One such grant was for $102,000 — $517,589 in 2021 dollars — to study the effects of alcohol on aggressive behavior in a species of sunfish, including one experiment to measure the effects of gin compared to tequila.

The same researcher spent another $90,000 — $456,696 in 2021 dollars — to attempt to turn rats into alcoholics by making them neurotic.

The rats were “put into insoluble situations or given unpredictable rewards and shocks,” the newspaper reported.

While Proxmire acknowledged there’s a role for animal experiments, he said, “the most effective way to understand human conditions and problems is to observe human behavior.”

He’s probably right, especially given that millions of taxpayer dollars were spent trying to answer these questions.

The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.