Abstract

It has been reported that laboratory animals can discriminate the presence of the psychomotor stimulant, D-amphetamine, from a non-drug or another drug condition. Under test conditions, doses lower than the training dose typically result in proportional decreases in D-amphetamine-appropriate responding, that is, dose-response curve is obtained. When drugs other than the training drug (D-amphetamine) are tested, they produced drug-appropriate responding to the extent that they resemble D-amphetamine (generalization or substitution test). And some antagonists (e.g., chlorpromazine) attenuate the stimulus effects of training drug. In the present review, the attempt to characterize the neuropharmacological characteristics of the discriminative stimulus properties of D-amphetamine is presented. The neural processes due to the transduction of D-amphetamine into stimulus properties may primarily involve central dopaminergic nervous system. Furthermore, drugs that share the discriminative stimulus properties in laboratory animals often produce similar subjective effects in human.