All of the cultivation of coca leaves, the main input into cocaine, and the refinement of these leaves into cocaine occurs in three countries: Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia (UNOD C World DrugReport 2010), with Colombia being the dominant producer.
This small unconditioned glutamate input in cocaine-naive animals might build through Pavlovian conditioning until it becomes the large, obvious, statistically reliable conditioned glutamate input seen in the dialysates of cocaine-trained animals.
This suggests sensitization of synaptic activity after acute cocaine only involved glutamatergic inputs.
Though not explicitly a work on cocaine but rather on the key input necessary for the production of this drug, this study argues that the argument for legalizing coca production would also generate less corruption in Bolivia, and hence the specific contribution of this study is to test whether this hypothesis holds for a key coca producing country.
To reconcile such shifts with our extension of Moisan and Rompré's hypothesis [79], cocaine would have to influence the input to midbrain dopamine neurons from afferents directly excited by the stimulation.
This should not be surprising because cocaine MI provides only the initial glutamate input to the dopamine system, not the sustained blockade of dopamine reuptake that accounts for the bulk of the dopamine elevation seen after self-administered doses of cocaine HCl [6], [7].
This peripherally triggered glutamate input was sufficient to reinstate cocaine-seeking in previously trained animals that had undergone extinction of the habit.
Furthermore, manipulations of cholinergic input in the VTA can change cocaine taking.
In addition, the alterations in the frequency of the sEPSCs from master mice was AP-dependent, suggesting adaptations in excitatory projections from pre-/infra-limbic cortex, but not of local inhibitory, GABAergic inputs, mediated cocaine-primed reinstatement of drug-seeking.
The second group coexpresses pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) and cocaine- and amphetamine-regulated transcript (CART) and has stimulatory inputs to the VMH and inhibitory inputs to the LH.
