The subjective properties of a drug play a large part in consumption, abuse, and addiction patterns. That is to say, the subjective experience of greater reward or less aversion as it relates to a drug will lead to a greater risk of abuse. Assessment of the motivational properties of ethanol has included the use of ethanol-induced conditioned place preference and ethanol-induced conditioned taste aversion (CTA) (Chester and Cunningham 1999; Chester et al. 1998). Interestingly, although not without inconsistencies, GABAergic involvement has been implicated in both of these tasks. For example, adult mice exposed to ethanol (via inhalation) during the adolescent period show an attenuated ethanol-induced CTA (Chester and Cunningham 1999; Smith 1989). Additionally, a chronic intermittent pattern of exposure, resulting in multiple withdrawals during adolescence, exacerbates this attenuated CTA (Diaz-Granados and Graham 2007; Graham and Diaz-Granados 2006). When subjects were administered diaze-pam during the withdrawal periods in order to assess the role of possible GABAA receptor withdrawal-related perturbations, the attenuation of the ethanol-induced CTA was not dissimilar between diazepam-treated and control animals, suggesting that GABAA receptor perturbations during withdrawal were
