Failure of baclofen to modulate discriminative-stimulus effects of cocaine or methamphetamine in rats

The effects of baclofen, an agonist at GABAB receptors, were evaluated in rats trained to discriminate 10.0 mg/kg of cocaine or 1.0 mg/kg of methamphetamine from saline under a fixed-ratio 10 schedule of food delivery. Baclofen (0.56-5.6 mg/kg) did not attenuate the discriminative-stimulus effects of the training dose of cocaine or methamphetamine and did not produce any shift in the cocaine and methamphetamine dose-response curves. Higher baclofen doses (3.0-5.6 mg/kg), however, markedly depressed or completely eliminated food-maintained responding. This suggests that previous reports of baclofen-induced decreases in cocaine self-administration behavior are connected, in some way, with either a general suppression of appetitive behaviors or with sedation and locomotor depression, rather than with any pharmacologically specific effect, and not accompanied by changes in subjective response to cocaine, as assessed by discriminative-stimulus measures. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.