There are several potential uses of the rate control paradigm. Most importantly, these results support the need for studies aiming to change how quickly people drink, the desire for rapidly increasing alcohol exposures, and their underlying neurobiology. Rate control could serve as an endpoint in studies aimed to screen interventions for efficacy prior to larger clinical trials. For example, a reduction (if not elimination) in the time to achieve 80 mg/dl could be considered a successful outcome of intervention, whether it is counselling about the dangers of binge drinking, a repurposed compound, or neuromodulation of reward circuitry. Further, pairing targeted analyses with objectively determined degrees of intense drinking may be a way to identify specific genes (or combinations) underlying subjective response, although obtaining a sufficient sample size may be challenging. Exploration of other contributors to drinking intensity, such as impulsivity 79 and sex as well as sexual identity differences, 80 are also warranted. Further, we envision rate control as an objective tool to examine the role of acute and chronic tolerance on the Binge and High‐Intensity Drinking phenotype.
