Dissociative and Discriminative Properties 01 Alcohol 1: Animal Studies

Abstract

The present article offers a review 01 papers that deal with alcohol's dissociative proper­ties and alcohol's administration as a discriminative stimulus. AIso, a review is presented 01 the results when generalization tests were carried out on subjects previously trained to discriminate the administration 01 alcohol from some other pharmacological condition. From this review it is concluded that alcohol has dissociative properties and that its administration can serve as a discriminative cue¡ however both the discriminative and dissociative properties are unique, since almost all drugs evaluated on generalization tests did not cross-generalize with the alcohol cue. The only drugs that cross-generalize with alcohol are barbiturates (although it has been shown that subjects can discriminate between alcohol and barbiturates) and 3-carboxysalsolinol which is a metabolic by­product 01 alcohol. Final/y, some diflerences on the degree 01 dissociation have been observed, depending on whether the initial training was carried out under alcohol or some other drug.