Drug Self-Administration Viewed as Ingestive Behaviour.pdfVIP

Appetite, 1997, 28, 1–5 Drug Self-Administration Viewed as Ingestive Behaviour ROY A. WISE Department of Psychology, Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada The brain circuitry and chemical messenger systems that mediate addiction evolved long before the phenomenon of addiction itself. Addiction is a recent evolutionary development; it emerged with the human mastery of ?re, the hypodermic syringe, and the bottle and cork. The receptors for addictive drugs and neural circuitry in which these receptors are imbedded, on the other hand, emerged with animal life itself and have, from their inception, been associated with ingestive behavior (Josefsson Johansson, 1979; Kavaliers Hirst, 1987). It should not be surprising that the foraging for self-administration of drugs utilizes the same brain mechanisms as are involved in foraging for foodstu?s and their self-administration. While the brain mechanisms of drug self-administration and food ingestion are only partly identi?ed, endogenous opioids and mesolimbic dopamine (Smith, 1995; Wise, 1982; Wise Rompre′, 1989) play clear and important roles in the habit-forming e?ects of both drugs and food. Thus while the term “ingestion” refers, strictly speaking, to the taking in of foodstu?s to the stomach, it is reasonable to consider drug selfadministration and feeding as members of the same behavioral category (as this Journal acknowledges in Instructions to Authors, 1980–1995). Indeed, while the relative contributions of caloric and pharmacological factors are hard to determine (Freed Lester, 1970), the oral consumption of ethanol—clearly the most prevalent form of drug self-administration—is an obvious case of ingestive behavior. Further evidence of common brain mechanisms comes from the interaction of drugs of abuse with feeding; feeding is facilitated by opiates (Grandison Guidotti, 1977; Tepperman Hirst, 1983; Wise, Jenck and Raptis, 1986), cannabis (Hollister, 1971), benzod