Evidence supporting lack of discriminative stimulus properties of a combination of naltrexone and morphine

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Abstract

The aim of the present experiment was to study the potentially discriminable effects of combinations of morphine and naltrexone during long-term treatment. Three groups of gerbils had to discriminate the effects of morphine (12 mg/kg) and those of either saline (4 ml/kg), naltrexone (2 mg/kg), or a combination of this dose of morphine plus naltrexone injected IP 60 min prior to the start of the discriminative training in a T-shaped maze. Rapid development of drug discriminative control of choice behavior (left or right turn in the maze) was evident in these 3 groups which is in marked contrast to the performance of gerbils trained with morphine-naltrexone combination vs. saline or gerbils trained with naltrexone only vs. saline. Neither of these latter groups reached the criterion of performing 8 correct first-trial choices in 10 consecutive training sessions during the 60 training sessions allowed, while the 3 other groups began their criterion performance after only 7–8 training sessions. Thus the discriminative properties of certain combinations of morphine and naltrexone are weak and therefore are not easily discriminable from the effects induced by saline.

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    A portion of the results was presented at the “Fifth Scandinavian Meeting on Physiology and Behavior,” May 20–22, 1977, Helsinki, Finland.

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