Marco Leyton, PhD, assures me the cocaine he purchased was legal. Plus, it wasn’t for him. Definitely not. It was for recreational cocaine users who had answered Leyton’s ad in a local newspaper to do drugs and collect 500 Canadian dollars — for science.
Leyton had jumped through many hoops to get to this point — getting an okay from the Canadian equivalent of the FDA, exempting him from criminal prosecution, and clearing his own university’s ethics approval. “I wasn’t asking people to bring in their own cocaine,” Leyton, an addiction neurobiologist at McGill University in Canada, tells me. Now that could be unethical.