Discriminative stimulus properties of drugs: a brief history and a selective review

Abstract
A brief history of the background of drug discrimination research is given, focusing on the concepts of “drug dissociation” or state‐dependent learning; an alternative explanation to the state dependency concept is to view the drug as a discriminative stimulus. In drug discrimination learning both a qualitative and a quantitative dimension is identified as governing the discrimination, examples of which are provided in the text. Examples of how drug discrimination techniques may assist in future research are outlined.