Mike Burr - log

Monkeys on Acid

They weren't apes. They were monkeys. Apes are expensive, so a small pharmacological lab ordered 40 rhesus monkeys. Most people don't know that you can outsource this kind of thing. A small pharmaceutical company wanted to test the safety of its product. Nothing fancy, let's just be sure it's not obviously toxic to obviously mammals, and it's a known fact that rhesus monkeys are at least kind of like people. Kind of. And it was in fact "acid" that these monkeys took. It was packaged and tweaked in ways that make it safer to handle, easier to identify (as brand X) in tests, and it does require some additional technical steps to administer. One can't use "blotter" paper for example. But these details are not really significant to our story. Bottom line: 40 monkeys were given a lot of LSD.

Much like cannabis years earlier. Some connected bunch of people had the idea of not throwing people in a cage for the crime of possessing a certain chemical compound. "Let's do something different" they said, and went about begging lawmakers to not throw anyone in cages over this particular compound. For a bit, just to see.

And any responsible company wants its product to be tested and safe, or at least to do what it says on the vile, and also not kill you. Which companies are "responsible" you ask? The ones that make it out of toddlerhood, minimally. It's easy to dismiss what bad press will do for you as "a company". Safety has to be implicit. All the other stuff is gravy.

So Daveport Safety Research received their 40 monkeys, none of whom died (ever, as it turns out). They also got neat, unambiguous protocols for all the parts of this bit of research. The value is in the actual doing after all, and doing this kind of thing reliable is a product you can sell.