The 1985 Upjohn award lecture. Tolerance, learning, and neurochemical adaptation

Alcohol or drug tolerance has been viewed traditionally as a homeostatic response to a direct chemical action of the agent on the neuron. This concept has undergone major modification as a result of recent observations that behavioral and environmental factors can alter markedly the tolerance developed to the same drug regimen. Obligatory task performance under the influence of the drug, classical conditional stimuli in an environment habitually associated with drug administration, previous exposure to a tolerance-producing regimen, and environmental modification of the expression of the drug's effect can all influence dramatically the degree of tolerance produced by a given dosage. Attempts to identify possible cellular mechanisms of tolerance development are illustrated by a review of studies on the relations between ethanol tolerance and changes in the neuronal membrane Na+ -K+ ATPase and its interaction with ethanol and norepinephrine, hippocampal serotoninergic systems and their interaction with a vasopressin derivative, a membrane-bound calcium- and calmodulin- dependent kinase, and hypothalamic-hypophyseal endorphin-producing systems. None of these studies or other similar ones, whether correlational or interventional in nature, has yet provided full and credible explanations of the effects of behavioral and environmental factors on tolerance development. Finding such explanations is the major current challenge in the neurobiology of tolerance.