"Even rats with a history of hard drug self-administration will stop using and switch to innocuous rewards such as sweet water or social contact when given the choice. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/mila.12502?campaign=wolearlyview… The image of craving as a desire of unimaginable and irresistible force is poised to solve the puzzle of addiction. But the image is flawed. In practice, it turns out that neither rats nor people mindlessly follow their desires for drugs in addiction. Even when rats have a history of drug self administration designed by experimentalists to mirror addiction, they choose alternative rewards to drugs in many circumstances. A series of [so-called forced-choice] studies found that 90% of rats chose sweet water over drug reward. This was so even if drug dose is high; cost of sweet water is significantly higher than cost of drug reward, as measured by number of lever-presses required to get either reward; and the individual animal has a long history of self-administration and escalation, and shows signs of withdrawal and sensitization. More recently, Venniro and colleagues adapted [the] forced-choice study paradigm to social reward. They found that almost 100% of rats—who were socially housed, so in no way socially deprived—chose social over drug reward, irrespective of training conditions, drug class, dose size, length of abstinence since last dose, and “addiction score” based on a DSM-style model adapted to rats. Rats chose drug reward only if choice of social reward was punished by moderate to high foot shock, or delivery of social reward was significantly delayed. What explains why rats in [some] early experiments self-administered cocaine until death is not the power of drugs in forming either habits or desires. It is the lack of anything better as they lived alone, for weeks on end, in barren, experimental chambers."
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