Pubdate: Sat, 28 Oct 2000
Source: Daily Camera (CO)
Copyright: 2000 The Daily Camera.
Contact:  Open Forum, Daily Camera, P.O. Box 591, Boulder, CO 80306
Fax: 303-449-9358
Website: http://www.bouldernews.com/
Note: From the San Francisco Examiner

WHEN SCIENCE IS MONKEY BUSINESS

Imagine the excitement at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Laboratory 
observers scribble furiously on their clipboards. Their captive squirrel 
monkeys repeatedly push little levers that give them little injections of 
THC, the operative ingredient of marijuana.

Oh, wow. Although pot fiends argue with the fervor of religious zealots 
that marijuana isn't physically addictive, the federal study is being 
interpreted as proof to the contrary. Or so we learn from a report in the 
journal Nature Neuroscience.

That's all very well. Scientists get to go home at night and play Schubert, 
or chess, or the TV. But let's consider instead the criminally tedious 
existence of an imprisoned monkey designed by nature to leap in freedom 
from one vine to the next.

And into the cell comes the old dope peddler, wearing the white coat of 
science, who installs a pot-o-matic machine. The injections offer the 
monkeys a pleasurable but temporary escape from a meaningless life of cruel 
confinement, miserable diet and squirrelly companions in misery.

Were the same experiment conducted with human prisoners, is there any doubt 
that the levers would be pulled repeatedly? The proof of pot addiction 
doesn't sound like science. It sounds like monkey business.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager