Offensive Squid

Post edited 12:39 am – January 15, 2011 by Andrea_A

Could the catheter problem be avoided by having the rats press a button

that could administer a dose like a skin patch does? Add dsmo to get it

across the skin quickly? or maybe there could be a radio controlled

implant that would administer a dose when the rat chooses one button to

get food vs another. I also thought of having a needle the rat could

step on, but that might more painful than it should (although, how

painful is a catheter?)

I'm not self-confident enough to post this in the Blog (at the moment).

Could another bitter substance (with no pharmacological action) added to the sugar making the control taste equal?

The rats have to make the decision to get drugs or not. Maybe it would be sufficient to teach them pressing a button results in a drug injection (done by staff members). Eventually using a subcutaneously implanted "port" (as used for chemotherapy in cancer) would this job make easier and less uncomfortable for the animals. And if you carry out such studies in countries like India, China, Iran, …, the needed manpower would probably be affordable.

Addressing the implant: for a rat it has to be minimalized. If you are using a bigger animal as model (dog, pig or monkey) you may use a commertially available insulin pump. But is behaviour of these animals as well known as rat's?

Alternatively Cocaine administered as an aerosol? With rats getting their dose in an inhalation chamber? Well, this dope is injected — or sniffed …

Catheter: If placed correctly, you won't feel too much. At time of insertion it hurts a bit — and some stitches afterwards. But I got only peripheral venous ones at some operations I underwent a couple of years ago. Arterial (or central venous) catheters could maybe something completely different …

Hljothlegur said:

I love the idea that the enrichment of the environment reduces the need for getting stoned, or perhaps high stress in the environment induces drug use.  It makes sense.

Thinking this way, too. And even if the theory is not true, officially selling even hard drugs (or getting them easily prescribed to addicts) and dealing might become un-interesting. (Think of the Prohibition.)  A co-worker talked about his experiences with legal and illegal drugs in youth — and it had been only a "phase".  Completely opposite to me. I had an alcohol-addicted aunt and due to this "model" I decided not even to try (and now I'm not sure if I could learn to deal with alcohol nowadays). She had been very ill (years on dialysis, receiving a kidney that didn't start working) religious in a screwed up manner — but needed other "spiritual help" to cope with her life …

The drug delivery method, I agree, is really, really problematic.  It's oral.  Rats are wildly omnivorous and very sensitive to tastes and smells, or they die from eating something they oughtn't.  Bitterness can indicate alkaloid poisons, and we just can't eliminate the possibility that for the deprived rats the lack of social stimulation, lack of pheromones, and other missing factors from an enriched environment, their sense of smell of taste is impeded or altered enough they can't detect the "poison".  And rats adore sweetness, so anything with sugar it …..

I overread this at Walrus:

Only when he added naloxone, which eliminates morphine’s narcotic
effects*, did the rats in Rat Park start drinking from the
water-sugar-morphine bottle. They wanted the sweet water, but not if it
made them high.

*but not the bitter taste

Or even worse, what if the lack of general stimulation for the deprived rats makes any stimulation pleasant, and the bad-tasting water is more stimulating than the plain by virtue of tasting bad.  (Note that people love capsaicin, with no taste, but which activates your pain receptors.  Think about that for a minute.) 

Not only capsaicin. Think of "self-harming" (humans, lonely parrot (pulling out feathers), e.g.). Btw: Preferring Bitter Lemon to "only sweet" lemonade. And radicchio to other lettuce.

What I mean is, people are outrageously omnivorous, too, but our primary sense is vision, so we might be not taking the rat POV into account, one where taste and smell are their world.  Any drug delivery method that goes by their noses or tongues and we have to consider they are selecting between tastes/smells.  

That's what I meant: give them the choice (maybe in a pre-test) between narcotic and not-narcotic bitter-sweet water.

Hljothlegur said:

… and including one to determine if naxolone is detectible, too.  I see no info that naxolone  is undetectable in water to rats, and we need to make sure of that.  

Maybe a simple pre-pretest with humans, first. They could ask some taste-trained persons (cook, sommelier, coffee-/tea-tester). If they could notice a difference, rats 100%, too.