HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/drugs/monkeys.cocaine

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 4KB | 75 lines

Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
From: [e-mail] (Michael Wang)
Subject: Re: nifty local (?) ad
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1993 07:58:16 GMT

In article <220ef6$[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Pete Hartman) writes:
>On a station local to Peoria, IL, I saw an ad for a drug rehab
>center that had some interesting (and I believe false) comments
>regarding cocaine.
>
>They show a monkey.  The voice over is talking about how when
>given free access to cocaine, this monkey (obviously not really
>THIS monkey, or he'd be dead) gave up food, sex, and everything
>else, just to get cocaine.  Then they dissolve to a guy, and
>go on with something like "if you want to get the cocaine monkey
>off your back, call us at...."
>
>Am I right in remembering that the monkey study of cocaine was flawed?
>Aren't monkeys (like humans) normally capable of self-regulation wrt
>to coke?

From _The Case for Legalizaing Drugs_ by Richard Lawrence Miller:

  An anti-drug advertisement stated, "In animal studies, monkeys with
  unlimited access to cocaine self-administer until they die. One
  monkey pressed a bar 12,800 times to obtain a single dose of
  cocaine."...The ad does not reveal that in psychological
  conditioning the strength of reponse (number of bar pressings) can
  be increased by withholding the reward (cocaine)...Animals typically
  press a bar for cocaine several hours after it is no longer delivered,
  and then quit. Such behavior is no more alarming than humans who
  insert money in a vending machine and keep yanking the lever when
  nothing is delivered. Humans have even died after pulling
  tightfisted vending machines onto themselves...Likewise, experiments
  normally do not test whether an animal will press a bar many times:
  conditioning principles of Pavlov and Skinner can train animals to
  do remarkable things, even water can produce the same complusive
  behaviour as cocaine...
    Whenever we hear about animal experiments we should ask if they
  force choices upon the animals. When allowed to move around in
  natural-seeming habitats, when allowed to choose among many options,
  animals do not use drugs to excess. Even in some laboratory settings
  monkeys limit their cocaine intake (28-29).

There is also a very interesting footnote about the experiment that
the ad was probably referring to (I left out the footnote references
because practically every sentence has an associated footnote. I
strongly recommend people who are interested in this stuff to get this
book).

    Although we cannot be sure, references to a monkey who pressed a
  bar 12,800 times for cocaine probably refer to work done at the
  University of Michigan in the 1960's. Each monkey was restrained
  inside a cubicle measuring 36 inches by 30 inches by 26 inches...The
  experiment which produced 12,800 bar pressings was a "progressive
  ratio" exercise, meaning that the monkey was trained to double and
  redouble its work for the same reward...In this experiment the
  choice was not between cocaine and food, but rather cocaine or
  nothing....An important detail, normally omitted from citations of
  this experiment, was that the cubicle contained _two_ bars to press,
  one hooked to the cocaine injection apparatus and one that was a
  dummy. This setup allows us to judge whether the monkey was pressing
  a bar for the reward, or just pressing any available bar out of
  boredom...The researchers did not give comparative figures for the
  progressive ratio experiment, but "during periods of high [cocaine]
  drug intake all monkeys pressed the inactive lever as frequently as
  the active lever" (176-177).

--
Michael Wang
[e-mail]