Head-fixed intravenous drug self-administration: a new frontier in addiction neuroscience

Nature Protocols, Published online: 17 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41596-026-01438-7

Drug self-administration studies capture the voluntary, goal-directed nature of human drug taking, allowing investigators to dissociate the behavioral and neural mechanisms that motivate drug seeking and taking from the pharmacological effects of drug exposure itself. Now, a protocol provides instructions for hardware assembly and implementation of intravenous drug self-administration in head-fixed mice.