A friend asked me over lunch the other day, "Hey Bob, what do you think of this ad in the City Paper?" She showed me the back cover of a local free weekly. "Smoke Pot-Get Paid!" it read, "To $2,680 Cash! Legal Studies. Private (215) 602-2410 ConfidentialReport.com."

I replied that I'd never needed to answer an ad to find a study, and so I had no real opinions for that area of discussion. The ad, however, was pretty cheesy, so I decided to check the URL and give the phone number a try. As one might expect, it got worse and worse.

Whenever a company hawks its wares by first getting the consumer interested in getting stoned, the warning lights should turn on. This was only the first problem I had with "National Research Group."

I checked the web site, and the first thing I saw was a little sign that changed to several more dangling lures, like "Drink Alcohol, $1500," and "Safe Sex Research, $850." There were a few more that referred to sleep studies and memory/personality studies. There was nothing about how, when a subject signs up for a scientific experiment, they will almost always undertake some level of personal risk, and sometimes the risk is considerable. There was nothing about the basic discomforts, such as needle sticks, catheterization, naso-gastric intubation, soft tissue biopsies, and urine/feces sample collection. Naturally there were no mentions of the known and expected side effects involved in taking all those other drugs under research (all but one-millionth of the whole lot), such as nausea, headaches, dryness of mouth, etc.. Not a word about the unknown problems that scientists are paying the guinea pig to find --the whole point of any Investigational New Drug study -- including psychiatric episodes, skin lesions, heartbeat irregularities, and a few deaths here and there.

Inside the site, there is no person's name, and only two mail-drop addresses, where the company collects payments for its basic product: a book full of contact numbers of recruiters in research facilities. I've seen an early version of this glorified piece of crap. It's a list of all the phone numbers, old or new, for every type of researcher that ever conducted an experiment or gathered data to develop a product. This includes all sorts of local doctors who have looked for patients with a condition or disease, focus groups that ask for reactions to advertisements, fertility clinics, and a few actual research units, which actually are looking for healthy volunteers. The average young party animal, looking for sex and drug use as a paying job, will find the book a great way to squander $20 and then to squander more time and money by making calls to disconnected lines and medical offices that are not looking for lazy, drunken college students.

The site runs a disclaimer: They don't recommend any particular products or services, and the only sell the book, with its contact information. They're not responsible for whatever happens between you & me; the people running studies. How about that! No ethics board in the picture, then? I guess if the simple rules of Capitalism were applied to medical science across the board, we'd be seeing some pretty funny informed consent forms: "Try out our new cancer drug -- meet sexy girls!"

These cheap hucksters want you to believe that the life of a human research subject is as easy as hanging out at a frat party. They state on the site that they've been seen on Fox TV, Oprah, and Discovery. They have this local number in Philadelphia, which refers you (after listening to a recorded sales pitch that repeats what's on the web site) to another number in Washington D.C. This speaks of a substantial and well-funded, but hard-to-trace operation, which sells largely useless books by appealing to one's basest instincts, and which pushes all the lame, cheap myths about guinea pigging to suckers. They even re-chew the ancient anecdote about film director Robert Rodriguez getting started with this kind of income! They want to be sure that their customers are only the most stupid people on Earth: Buy this book, get free booze & dope, get paid to have sex, start a glamorous career in Hollywood! It reminds me (again) of the similarities between the sex business and the recruitment of human research subjects. How does this "National Research Group" and its selling tactics differ from phone-sex numbers, penis-enlargement ads, or on-line Viagra ads?