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.