Comparison of the behavioral and cardiovascular effects of mephedrone with other drugs of abuse in rats.

Rationale: Exceedingly little experimental research exists on the popular recreational drug mephedrone (4-methylmethcathinone) despite clinical reports concerning its behavioral and cardiovascular toxicity.

Objectives: To characterize mephedrone preclinically by examining its capacity to (1) serve as a discriminative stimulus, (2) disrupt the acquisition of response sequences, and (3) disrupt mean arterial pressure (MAP) and heart rate (HR).

Methods And Results: In one group of subjects that reliably discriminated 3.