Well . . . I could go on and on (and on), but two "not so" quick points:
1.) They had no idea about the motivation of "dopers":
The ad I answered asked for males age 18-35 for 94 day marijuana research project, $800-1600. You got $800 just for outlasting the whole 94 day "incarceration", and you earned the rest doing repetitive tasks. On weekdays, after lunch and a mandatory joint, from 1:00 pm to 4:45pm (IIRC) you earned money per successful answer. One day, you did a primer level foreign language manual. The other day, you got a printout of multi-digit, multi number addition problems and a calculator, more or less like so:
1432094
2283109
4284776
5933021
There were 6 of us there at any one time. We entered serially, so you started as the new guy (and went two weeks "straight" as your own "control) while one by one the other guys left and new ones entered.
Quick math will show they were budgeted so that, AT THE MOST, each subject would only earn an additional $800 doing these tasks. They originally were paying 25 cents a right answer, and the first guys were coming out of there with $4,400- $4,600. I arrived just on the cusp, when they abrubtly cut the compensation down to 10 cents a right answer. I STILL earned over $2,200! (More than $600 over their per capita budget).
2.) They had no idea about what a "normal amount" of marijuana was:
The weed we smoked was government grown at the University of Mississippi (so we were told), and was pretty high quality. It came in individually numbered manilla envelopes as joints the size of a 100mm cigarette, but with no filter. Where the filter would have been, there was a double red line on the joint and a cute little red "M". That's a lot of weed. That's a Buffalo Bomber!! It was an individual dose, that is, it was the amount to be smoked by one person alone at one sitting.
Long story short, we smoked as many as 28-30 of these a day, every day! After awhile, I would wake up each morning and hack up black tar phlegm balls into the toilet.
So, years later, when I read that research coming out of the UCLA Medical Center was indicating that marijuana smoking was potentially as dangerous to your lungs as a cigarette addiction, I had to fvcking laugh! That would be equivalent to smoking -- I dunno, you tell me -- maybe 5-6 CARTONS of unfiltered ciggies a day?
Just one small example of the way their methodology was bogus and whack.
Don't get me started! Between the semi-colorful stories and the bullsh!t, it would be a book length essay.