Conditioned taste aversions as a behavioral baseline for drug discrimination learning: Assessment with the dipsogenic compound pentobarbital

Animals injected with pentobarbital prior to the presentation of a saccharin‐LiCl pairing and its vehicle prior to saccharin alone rapidly acquired the drug discrimination, avoiding saccharin following the administration of pentobarbital and consuming saccharin in its absence. That drug discrimination was acquired within the taste aversion design even though the stimulus drug itself (i.e., pentobarbital) produced significant increases in consumption in nonconditioned control subjects suggests that the dipsogenic properties of a compound are not necessarily a problem for the assessment of drug discrimination learning within the aversion procedure. The present data, along with prior reports on the effectiveness of the taste aversion design with the stimulus drugs phencyclidine and naloxone, indicate that the conditioned taste aversion procedure may be effective as a general method in the assessment of drug discrimination learning.