MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DO

IMAGINE the excitement at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Laboratory
observers scribble furiously on their clipboards. Their captive squirrel
monkey s repeatedly push little levers that give them little injections of
THC, the ope rative 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 by
researcher Steven Goldberg in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

That's all very well for him to say. 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.