Chemical aversion therapy: Rat data suggest it may be countertherapeutic to pair an addictive drug state with sickness

Learned associations between drug states: Attempted analysis in Pavlovian terms

“…Revusky et al (1979) found a pronounced avfail effect with four or eight Barb-vLif.l pairings, but no detectable effect with either one or two such pairings.…”

“…Four to eight CS-US pairings were capable of preventing as many as 13 successive SAC-Barb pairings from producing a saccharin aversion . In other experiments, Revusky et al (1979) showed that the effect was not limited to cases in which pentobarbital was the CS and lithium was the US. It can be obtained when a variety of recreational drugs are paired with high doses of lithium or when a sedative dose of pentobarbital is paired with an extremely high dose of d-amphetamine.…”

“…CAT has one serious limitation: It produces aversions only to the flavor of alcohol, not to the alcohol state (Rachman & Teasdale, 1969). Using rats, Revusky, Taukulis, Parker, and Coombes (1979) tried to get around this problem by pairing a mild drug state (called the CS), which many humans would find enjoyable, with intense sickness (called the US); presumably some of the aversiveness of the US drug would transfer to the CS drug. They tested for transferred aversiveness by allowing consumption of saccharin solution prior to injection of the CS drug in order to produce a saccharin aversion .…”

“…Group LiCl-+Barb was expected to exhibit a mild saccharin aversion. The Barb-alone and LiCI-alone procedures mentioned in column 2 of Table I were deemed superfluous for this experiment because Revusky et al (1979) found they yielded results similar to those yielded by Group LiCl-+Barb.…”

“…In contrast Pavlov insisted that many CSt-+US trials must be intermixed with many CS 2-+CS t trials if conditioned inhibition is to be obtained. A second feature of the avfail procedure designed to favor higher order conditioning over conditioned inhibition was the lack of a temporal overlap between the saccharin taste and the pentobarbital sedation during the Sac-+Barb pairing; indeed, in the Barb-+LiCI trials of their first .e~periment (Table I), Revusky et al (1979) did not Inject the pentobarbital until II min after the saccharin bottle had been removed. According to Pavlov (1927), a temporal gap between CS 2 and CSt strengthens higher order conditioning by weakening conditioned inhibition.…”