terminated, the neuroadaptations underlying these negative emotional states remain and the organism learns that continued ingestion of drugs self-medicates the symptoms associated with withdrawal (Heilig et al., 2006; Heilig et al., 2010; Markou et al., 1998). The combined results of the current experiments support this hypothesis by showing that preventing neural plasticity during acute withdrawal in dependent animals attenuates escalated operant self-administration of ethanol.
