NEW STUDY CALLS POT ADDICTIVE, BUT OTHERS DISAGREE

NEW YORK -- Monkeys repeatedly dosed themselves with the main active
ingredient of marijuana in a new federal study. The researchers say that
result emphasizes the idea that people can get hooked on pot and provides a
new way to test therapies.

Lab animals will actively dose themselves with most drugs abused by people,
but marijuana has been an exception, said researcher Steven Goldberg of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse, called NIDA.

Some people might interpret that as suggesting it has little potential for
addiction, he said. But the new work found that squirrel monkeys repeatedly
pushed a lever to get injections of the marijuana ingredient THC, Goldberg
and colleagues report in the November issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience.

NIDA says marijuana causes often uncontrollable craving and use, despite
health and social consequences, and so is addictive. Not everyone agrees.

"This drug is not addicting. Clinical experience says that," said Dr.
Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard Medical School emeritus professor of psychiatry.

The monkey study doesn't prove otherwise, said Grinspoon, who is chairman
of the board of the NORML Foundation, which promotes medical use of
marijuana and ultimately its legalization.

In Goldberg's experiment, four squirrel monkeys sat through hour-long test
sessions once a day with a tube attached to a vein.

When a green light turned on, they could push a lever 10 times to get a THC
injection. They gave themselves up to 30 injections per session, versus one
to four when the tube delivered only water.

On the Net: www.nida.nih.gov/