agonist increased the motivation of rats to self-administer beer despite increased responding for both control substances (near beer and sucrose) used in this study. More convincing results for the role of CB1 activation in the reinforcing properties of ethanol have been obtained by microinjecting WIN into the posterior VTA (Linsenbardt and Boehm, 2009). In this study, WIN microinjection into the posterior VTA increased binge-like ethanol consumption during the second half of a drinking in the dark paradigm supporting the hypothesis that CB1-modulation of VTA neurons contributes the motivation to consume ethanol. Finally, treatment of mice with a CB1 agonist was found to increase ethanol preference in both high-consuming C57BL/6 and low-consuming DBA/2 strains (Vinod et al., 2008b).
