Self-Selection of Alcohol by Animals, Human Variation, and the Etiology of Alcoholism; A Critical Review

Abstract

The experimental results (to mid-1965) in animals and man bearing upon the factors which may be related to the development of addiction and the etiology of alcoholism have been reviewed. A critical assessment has been attempted of the efforts to reveal some of the variables influencing the voluntary selection of alcohol by animals, e. g., age, sex, species, strain, taste, smell, diet, temperature, stress, prior familiarity with alcohol, and so on, and the genetic and biochemical bases of any increased selection of alcohol. Such studies, though of undoubted scientific interest in themselves, would appear, not only because of the essential unity of living organisms, to offer the hope that they do, at many points, have some relevance to the human condition. The experimenter''s goal is the possibility that an animal model of human addiction to alcohol, minus the social encumbrances of human alcoholism, can be produced. None of these studies can be said to have produced such a model, but a few give promise that it will be achieved. The intravenous self-administration of alcohol (to intoxication) in monkeys, the increased self-selection of alcohol in rats afters its intracerebral administration, and the production of the continuously intoxicated state in the rat voluntarily ingesting alcohol orally, all give substance to this possibility. A wide variety of biochemical measures have been performed in blood, urine, saliva and other tissues in an attempt to differentiate the alcoholic from his nonalcoholic counterpart. In great measure, the lack of success may be attributed to a confusion of cause and effect; an inappropriate identification of the results of prolonged heavy alcohol ingestion with their existence prior to the alcoholism; examination of almost everything analyzable without regard to relevance; and an inadequate appreciation of what constitutes an alcoholic and what constitutes a valid control. The search, therefore, for an "inborn error of metabolism" has been without profit. There is a bibliography of 127 references.