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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