Alcohol use disorders (AUDs) affect an estimated 8.5% of the US population over the age of 18, and problems associated with AUDs cost the United States economy up to $185 billion per year (NIAAA, 2009). This enormous economic and public health problem is due to the addictive behaviors of alcohol abusing and dependent individuals. These behaviors are driven by two hallmark features of addiction: an overriding compulsion to seek and use alcohol and an inability to control or inhibit these actions even though they result in a negative outcome (e.g. loss of job, imprisonment, family problems, etc). These two features of addiction are thought to emerge from aberrant learning processes and plasticity in the striatum and frontal cortices (For review see Kalivas, 2008; Koob and Volkow, 2010) a subset of which are general mechanisms that participate in driving the addictive phenotype for all drugs of abuse. Historically, dopamine (DA) has been seen as a key neuromodulator driving reward processes, but an increasing amount of attention has been focused on other neuromodulatory and neurendocrine systems that may serve as more tenable
