Drug discrimination

Not to be confused with Discrimination against drug addicts.

Drug discrimination (DD) is a technique in behavioral neuroscience used to evaluate the discriminative stimulus properties or interoceptive cues of psychoactive drugs. In drug discrimination, a subject is trained on a training drug, and then it is tested with novel drugs to see if the novel drugs are experienced as similar to the training drug. In essence, the drug discrimination paradigm has the subject "tell" the experimenter "I think you gave me the training drug" or "I don't think you gave me anything".

The discriminative stimulus properties of drugs are believed to reflect their subjective effects. When partial or full stimulus generalization of a test drug to a training drug occurs, the test drug can be assumed to have effects that are subjectively similar to those of the training drug. Drug discrimination tests are usually performed in rodents, but have also been conducted in non-human primates and humans.

Drug discrimination assays have been employed to assess whether drugs have stimulant-, hallucinogen- or entactogen-like effects, among many other varieties of drug effects. The exact neural basis leading to an animal's interoceptive response is unknown and is likely to vary depending on the drug class.

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