This week’s Golden Horseshoe is awarded to the National Institutes of Health for a $14 million experiment last year on monkeys that included feeding them marijuana edibles and then monitoring the effects, according to the watchdog group Open The Books.
The primate marijuana experiment had two parts, according to an investigation by the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP).
In the first part, female macaques were served THC edibles daily for up to four months. They were then observed to see if any changes occurred in their menstrual cycles.
In part two, male macaques were fed the edibles for up to seven months and then observed to see if any fertility changes occurred.
NIH awarded the two grants for the experiments. A $13.1 million grant was awarded to the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), and $1.1 million was awarded to the University of Missouri-Columbia.
“The White Coat Waste Project was only able to find the enormous price tag of this project by filing a complaint with the NIH,” wrote Open The Books CEO and founder Andrew Andrzejewski. “Federal law known as the Stevens Amendment requires labs to say what percent of the costs of the experiment come from taxpayer money, the dollar amount of taxpayer funds used, and the percent and amount of funding by non-governmental sources. The Oregon Health and Science University disclosed none of these figures in its reports announcing the research results.”
Andrzejewski also pointed out that since recreational marijuana is legal in Oregon, experiments could have been conducted on humans.
Hellbound and Down 