The gateway hypothesis of drug use postulates that certain drugs of abuse (including alcohol, nicotine and marijuana) can increase the propensity to use "harder" drugs (including cocaine) later on in life. However, distinguishing causality from mere correlation using human populations has proven extremely difficult.
So to test whether alcohol consumption can increase cocaine use, researchers at Columbia University, New York City, evaluated cocaine-seeking behaviors of rats by dividing them into two groups: The first group was given alcohol prior to cocaine exposure, while the second group was offered water instead of alcohol.
The study's first author Dr. Edmund A. Griffin Jr., an assistant professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, said: "We found that the animals in the alcohol group had enhanced behavioral responses. We looked not only at how much cocaine they used but also will they continue to use a drug, even if they have a negative consequence - like a foot shock."
The rats with prior alcohol exposure were found to be more persistent in seeking cocaine, pressing a lever to release the drug an average of 58 times during the experiment, compared to rodents without alcohol exposure who used the lever only 18 times.
Dr Griffin added: "Our study helps us to understand how an early exposure to something like alcohol can actually tip the balance and increase a person's ability to develop addiction."
The research, which was published in the journal Science Advances, went also further and described causal molecular mechanisms that were affected in the brain by alcohol.
Part of this text was originally written by Ella Wills and appeared in EveningStandard.
Image: Sigarru/Getty Images
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