Abstract
The effects of mescaline (3,4,5-trimethoxyphenylethylamine), a hallucinogen, can function as a discriminative stimulus in appropriately trained rats. As a test of the hypothesis that those pharmacologic properties which distinguish hallucinogens and non-hallucinogens in man are reflected in distinctive stimuli in rats, the present experiments examined the effects of 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (DOM), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-ethylamphetamine (DOET), d-amphetamine, and cocaine in rats trained with mescaline as a discriminative stimulus. Administration of a range of doses of DOM and DOET to subjects in which saline functioned as SD and mescaline as Sδ revealed that a dose of 0.3 mg of either DOM or DOET was equivalent to the training dose of mescaline. When tested in rats in which mescaline served as SD, DOM and DOET were likewise found to mimic mescaline. In contrast, doses of d-amphetamine and cocaine (1 and 30 mg/kg, respectively) which were equivalent to the training dose of mescaline as Sδ, did not result in responding appropriate for the mescaline condition when mescaline was trained as SD. When DOET (0.3 mg/kg) was substituted for saline as Sδ, no evidence of discriminated responding was obtained in the course of 50 sessions. The present data, in conjunction with previous observations, suggest that those effects of mescaline in the rat which function as a discriminative stimulus are better correlated with pre-hallucinogenic LSD-like activity in man then with hallucinogenic activity per se. Thus, these effects in rats represent a necessary but not a sufficient condition for prediction of hallucinogenic activity in man.
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This investigation was supported in part by Grant 15406 from the National Institute of Mental Health.
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Winter, J.C. The effects of 2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine (DOM), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-ethylamphetamine (DOET), d-amphetamine, and cocaine in rats trained with mescaline as a discriminative stimulus. Psychopharmacologia 44, 29–32 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00421179
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00421179