ARLINGTON, Va. — Seven cartoon mice in an interactive computer program at the Drug Enforcement Administration's museum take drugs and get brain scans to help visitors learn about drugs' effects on the brain.
The program, created at the University of Utah, is part of a new exhibit — "Good Medicine, Bad Behavior: Drug Diversion in America" — that focuses on prescription drug abuse. The exhibit opens to the public today at the DEA headquarters in Arlington, Va.
At a computer terminal next to a simulated dead body on a gurney covered with a sheet, visitors can guide a virtual researcher's hand to pick up one of the mice at the "Mouse Party" in a glass tank at a lab.
One mouse is woozy from alcohol, one twitches from cocaine use, another lays lethargic on a couch high on heroin, one puffs away on a marijuana cigarette and others show symptoms of using other illegal drugs.
Visitors pick up a mouse, put it in a chair, and then it is whisked away to a scanner that analyzes what is going on in the mouse's brain. Additional animation and a voice-over describe how the brain normally works and then how the drugs affect the brain.
While the museum's exhibit is new, the "Mouse Party" program has been around online since 2006, said Kevin Pompei, associate director of the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center, which created the program.
With the help of high-school and middle-school teachers across the nation, the center devoted three years to developing the Mouse Party and its own Web site called "The New Science of Addiction: Genetics and the Brain."
"It was clear the students were curious about what drugs actually did to you," Pompei said, "but it was real clear the teachers didn't want the site to have an anti-drug message, but to be about science."
Pompei, who directed the team that created Mouse Party, said students get "bombarded" with anti-drug messages, which they tune out.
Six people worked on the site, including Pete Anderson, who did all the animation for Mouse Party, and Harmony Starr, who was responsible for researching and validating the science, as well as writing the text for the animation, Pompei said.
The DEA saw the Web site and wanted it for the new museum. Pompei said the site has also been included in the BodyWorld traveling exhibit that features specially preserved bodies without skin to show how muscles and the skeleton work. A museum in Mexico City has translated the Web site into Spanish.
Mouse Party was initially designed for teachers to use in the classroom, but Pompei said a nice surprise has been its use by drug-addiction counselors and law enforcement officials.
"It gets a huge amount of traffic from all over the world," he said, estimating that the online version of Mouse Party gets 4,000 to 5,000 hits a day.
At the new exhibit, Mouse Party is part of the "Medicine and the Body" portion, where visitors learn about the overall effects of drugs on the brain. The museum exhibits talk about how some drugs have healing and pain-relieving elements but can affect the brain if taken incorrectly or in deadly combinations.
While the DEA museum has exhibits on illegal drugs, it created the prescription drugs showcase because of the rising rates of abuse.
About 7 million people — up 80 percent in six years — are abusing prescription drugs, more than those using all illegal narcotics combined, according to the DEA.
On the Web
"Mouse Party" is part of a new exhibit, "Good Medicine, Bad Behavior: Drug Diversion in America," that opens today at the Drug Enforcement Administration's museum in Arlington, Va. The program was created at the University of Utah and may be viewed at: learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/addiction/drugs/mouse.cfm
The museum's Web site for the exhibit is at: www.goodmedicinebadbehavior.org
And the U of U's Web site on "The New Science of Addiction: Genetics and the Brain" is at: learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/addiction/
E-mail: suzanne@desnews.com