Relationship between minimum reinforcing doses and injection speed in cocaine and pentobarbital self-administration...

The relationship between minimum reinforcing doses and injection speed was investigated by using 2 levels of speeds in experiments on self-administration of cocaine or pentobarbital in 2 crab-eating monkeys each. The experiments were conducted under a fixed ratio (FR) 1 schedule with 30-min time-out after each drug injection, wherein the drugs and saline were made available for alternate 5-day periods. The minimum reinforcing doses at each injection speed were determined by the titration procedure in which the presence or absence of reinforcing effect at a particular drug dose was judged based on comparison of the self-administration rate at that dose with the rate in the preceding saline period. The results showed that the minimum reinforcing doses of cocaine and pentobarbital tended to be higher in inverse proportion to the injection speed of the drugs.