ABSTRACT
There are undoubtedly many complex determinants of the use and abuse of drugs by human beings. In human subjects, of course, the factors are complexly interwoven. One approach to disentangling them is to utilize animal models. This chapter is concerned with some aspects of the control of self-administration of alcohol by oral consumption in the laboratory mouse. One of the most intriguing aspects of the alcohol preference of C57BL mice is that it is not complete. Even in the C57BL mouse, the regulation of alcohol intake may be vastly more complex than such a system would imply, but it may be a valuable exercise to determine how much explanatory power can be extracted from this simple model. C57BL mice consume from 2/3 to 3/4 of their daily total fluid intake from the alcohol solution. The standard testing situation offers each mouse two drinking bottles, one containing tap water, the other containing a 10% solution of ethanol in tap water.
