Autumn 2005
O'Shaughnessy's
Journal of the California Cannabis Research Medical
Group
|
Goldberg's Monkeys Bat Last
Steven Goldberg (right) in conversation with John McPartland, maintains
a colony of monkeys in Baltimore, Maryland that have been trained to
self-administer THC (by injection).
Goldberg and Zuzana Justinova presented a poster on “The Abuse
Potential of the Endocannbinoid Transport Inhibitor AM404: Self-Administration
by Squirrel Monkeys.” AM404 is one of the many compounds that
corporate- and government-funded scientists have developing in hopes
of achieving higher cannabinoid levels by means than the illegal herb.
Goldberg’s monkeys liked AM404 enough to self-administer it,
which means, in NIDA’s terms, that AM404 is a drug with potential
for abuse. After all their effort to create an alternative to smoked
marijuana, the drug companies will have to run their products by Goldberg’s
monkeys!
The Goldberg-Justinova poster concluded “AM404 functioned
as an effective reinforcer (comparable to THC, anadamide and cocaine
under identical conditions) in non-human primates under a fixed-ratio
schedule
of drug injection. Our findings suggest that medications which
promote
the actions of endocan-nabinoids throughout the brain by inhibiting
their membrane transport have a potential for abuse. It remains
to be seen whether medications such as FAAH inhibitors, which augment
CB1 signaling only in certain regions of the nervous system, would
be self-administered in a similar manner.”
Your correspondent had always heard that monkeys couldn’t be
trained to self-administer THC. When this was mentioned to Goldberg,
he said other researchers had used “Old World monkeys,” whereas
he used squirrel monkeys from South America. But the real key to his
success, he added, was the very low doses with which he rewarded the
monkeys. This made sense —most of the primates I know prefer
a slight alteration of mood to getting knocked-out-loaded. It also
resonated with a talk on neuro-protection by Italian investigators
in which they found that a synthetic cannabinoid was beneficial
only at the lowest concentrations tested, and detrimental at high
concentrations.
When the name of the game is cannabinoids, less can be more.