Stress increases the likelihood of self-administering a drug to an addictive extent, but this time we’re talking about stress during childhood. Or even as a fetus. Stress a pregnant rat and her offspring will have an increased propensity for drug self-administration as adults. Give a rat an experimentally induced birth complication by briefly depriving it of oxygen at birth, and you produce the same. Ditto if stressing a rat in its infancy. The same works in nonhuman primates—separate a monkey from its mother during development, and that animal is more likely to self-administer drugs as an
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