Re: MAPS: Free lunch with Gen. McCaffrey

["Bob Greer" <greers_maps@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Good going, Rick: it's great to have a calm, literate fellow defending "the
people's case" and "the scientific viewpoint" (Fortunately they coincide
here!)!

>Then I told him his big idea
>that we should stop calling it a war on drugs

How about "The Ethnic Cleansing on Drugs"?

I mean, it's not like anyone is shooting back...

>
>The following matter is not about psychedelics but Gen. McCaffrey said that
>NIDA  has funded studies with rhesus monkeys in which male monkeys were
given
>a choice of cocaine, food, water or female monkeys. They chose cocaine till
>they died.
> I thought that monkeys given the option of sex and companionship
>would not kill themselves with cocaine, that only isolated animals did
this.
>Does anyone know if there is any truth to McCaffrey's story?
>

In any case, it's sure to be related to the amount used, and the form of
use.

Dr. Eric Siegel, in his superb book "Intoxication", relates his experiments
with primates using cocaine in a natural setting.  He administered the drug
in bits of chewing gum, and found that a reasonably "wholesome" habit was
automatically maintained at, as I recall, 5 mg. per stick of gum.  (The
monkeys had an unlimited supply of the gum.)  Other than being a bit
energetic, I recall reading that their behavior was pretty normal on
cocaine-ized gum.

So it's really not "cocaine" but "cocaine hydrochloride injected
automatically with no delay whenever a button is pushed by the subject" that
was probably tested in the General's reference.  (Anyone speaking as he did
shoule *certainly* distribute a bibliography of critical reference to
journal articles and studies, I'd say.)

And let's face it: many injection-junkies prefer their drugs to sex.  And if
they were supplied their hypodermics ready-filled assembly-line style, 24
hours a day, the death rate would probably be quite high among them.  We
don't need monkeys to show us this.

But most of us *aren't* inclined to be junkies.  If we wanted enough cocaine
to die like those monkeys, we could get it.  So the experiment was (probaby)
this: "Primates were kidnapped, placed in a boring holding cell with the
same old faces, and then forcibly attached to injection machines that are
both loaded with cocaine and easily triggered with an idle touch.  No
explanation of the experiment or their options was offered to the subjects."

Heck, if that was the trip, I'd probably play along.  Like, there's a
choice?


- Bob Greer




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