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Comment
. 2021 Jan;46(2):271-272.
doi: 10.1038/s41386-020-00836-z. Epub 2020 Sep 1.

Sugar now or cocaine later?

Anne-Noël Samaha  1   2
Affiliations
Comment

Sugar now or cocaine later?

Anne-Noël Samaha. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2021 Jan.
No abstract available

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. When rats must choose between cocaine and an alternative, nondrug reward (sweet water), adding a programmed delay to both options causes rats to shift their preference to cocaine.
In this issue of Neuropsychopharmacology, Canchy et al. [9] tested the hypothesis that rats in cocaine choice studies choose the alternative reward more often than they choose the drug because the delay to cocaine reward is longer than it is for the nondrug option. To test this hypothesis, they allowed male rats to make a mutually exclusive choice between cocaine and sweet water, during tests where a delay was added to both options. When there was no delay (0 s), rats chose cocaine over sweet water on average only 20% of the time. With a 30-s delay, rats increased their cocaine choice, opting for the drug on average 50% of the time. Finally, with a 60-s delay, rats shifted their preference from sweet water to cocaine, choosing the drug on average 65% of the time.
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