Mescaline and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) as discriminative stimuli

Abstract

The observation that a particular drug state may acquire the properties of a discriminative stimulus is explicable on the basis of drug-induced interoceptive cues. The present investigation sought to determine (a) whether the hallucinogens mescaline and LSD could serve as discriminative stimuli when either drug is paired with saline and (b) whether discriminative responding would occur when the paired stimuli are produced by equivalent doses of LSD and mescaline. In a standard two-lever operant test chamber, rats received a reinforcer (sweetened milk) for correct responses according to a variable interval schedule. All sessions were preceded by one of two treatments; following treatment A, only responses on lever A were reinforced and, in a similar fashion, lever B was correct following treatment B. No responses were reinforced during the first five minutes of a daily thirty-minute session. It was found that mescaline and LSD can serve as discriminative stimuli when either drug is paired with saline and that the degree of discrimination varies with drug dose. When equivalent doses of the two drugs were given to the same animal, no discriminated responding was observed. The latter finding suggests that mescaline and LSD produce qualitatively similar interoceptive cues in the rat.