I see your edited post, good posts and good points - at this point I feel it may be helpful to clarify some terms (like reinforcing) and add a couple more specific terms that might be more helpful, for example craving, cue, etc. because in traditional reinforcement, amplification of craving and hyper development of visual cues that then trigger craving seem to be a large issue - I doubt that LSD can really produce cravings like is seen in that of a opiate/meth addict, now that being said there are recreational hard drug users, so concerning the "most people have commitments and can suppress the thought of doing psychedelics all the time whereas cocaine is hard to suppress" sort of notion, I think one confounding factor there is that the type of person who is running from personal demons/mental illness/traumas would be much more likely to have a bad trip and thus LSD wouldn't be a reinforcing drug for them (unless we're just talking about flipping that switch that guarantees just LSD euphoria) and then the nature of the cocaine trip is just more pure euphoria, not too much can go wrong. The other thing to consider is that the people who are not very likely to have bad trips (and are more likely to use LSD instead of cocaine) are probably much more sound mentally and environmentally and are much more committed to their job and societal standing etc and they acknowledge the stigma that hard drugs are very addicting and hard to control. So basically a certain type of person goes for LSD and a certain type of person goes for cocaine - the LSD type person is more resistant to addiction and setting aside life goals and then the cocaine person is the opposite, and the cocaine person can't really ruin the "LSD is non-addicting" stigma because of bad trips/tolerance issues essentially.
If reinforcement may be construed as a wider encouragement of repeating of an action, then I suppose anything that people do and then want to do again is reinforcing, but of course the degree of reinforcement matters (we wouldn't want to use the term until we wear it out). If mice are choosing a drug over food and water to the point of death than that is probably the epitome of reinforcing. But as I recall the experiments where mice made such an unhealthy decision were redone in a cage/environment for the mice that was much more stimulating, toys to play with, other mice in the cage etc. and the mice showed little interest in the drug. I hope I'm recalling correctly. So that would be an example of reinforcement being dependent on the average state of the mice. Now let's explore how average states can vary.
We may move to the mental illness category, OCD probably being an okay example of people who are driven to do things that they often acknowledge don't make sense and don't improve their lives, and often are really destroying their lives, yet there is no drug involved (no euphoria we may presume, maybe just anxiety relief). So maybe the OCD is "scratching an itch", maybe a parallel with nicotine here. But anyways, checking that lock 10 times every 10 minutes because it helps quell their fear of someone breaking in again and having another traumatic experience because they forgot to lock the door (random example). There might be a term for this, not chasing positive emotion but running away from negative emotion (escapism?), but we may assume that the running away from negative emotion (in this case by locking the doors) is reinforcing if it does decrease negative emotions, and someone who was just finding out they could decrease their negative emotions with a tactic like this might lock their doors more and more often - would we say this action (locking the doors) is reinforcing for that individual?
I hope that opens up this discussion involving reinforcement to the aspect of not just chasing euphoria but running away from shitty thoughts/feelings (which is indeed the case for some addicts in my experience, essentially escapism).
So my notion: euphoria/improvement of mood with substances and reinforcement are somewhat inseparable in higher cognitive beings regardless of typical addiction related neuroplasticity like DeltaFosB etc because the mind, separate of typical reinforcing circuitry involving visual cues/cravings etc, can put a value on which mental states we prefer to be in just purely as a normal memory, not an addiction related neuroplasticity enhanced memory. Then, we compare the memory of how we felt on the drug (which could be altered further with hard drugs/disruption of brain function) to our present feelings, weigh the consequences of taking a drug in the present moment (consequences being weighed by a brain area known to be disrupted by cocaine, and consequences of missing work etc. involving most brain areas probably) and weigh the benefits of taking the drug (which is altered by dysfunctional brain areas as well, dopamine mediating expectation of reward etc).
So if you look in the above parenthesis, I tried to highlight the probable differences between LSD euphoria type drugs and cocaine etc type drugs. LSD euphoria might not alter some of our mechanisms by which we judge whether it's better to take the drug or to remain sober and continue our professional lives, but it's still possible that flipping that LSD euphoria switch too often for too long could incur some of the same neural/behavioral changes that we see in hard drug addicts.
But yeah basically LSD euphoria is hard to use as an example of a drug that causes non reinforcing euphoria because of the nature of LSD and how that interacts with certain humans. But my main point is we could expand this discussion beyond what we observe in the animal studies, those animals might be much less sensitive to atypical reinforcing effects.
If a scientist absolutely knew (because of the science involved), that taking a drug would give them extreme euphoria for 12 hours, but at the end of the trip all memory of the trip would be "deleted", don't you think they would want to use the substance again once they contemplated the science and knew that they were going to be euphoric for 12 hours again before they had their memories erased? It would be easy for them to continue their professional lives but if they had nothing to accomplish, no responsibilities, one might assume they would use that substance quite a lot. So even with no memory of the euphoria a substance could be reinforcing given that the person is in a certain environment with a psyche that can understand the substance will give absolute euphoria and that they have nothing else they should do and they're not sternly against hedonism
Now if we switch this to a substance that gives a relatively mild euphoria but recollection is fully intact (my LSD switch device), reinforcement could develop as well, but through a more higher functioning sort of route rather than through the limbic system generating cravings/withdrawals and potent reactions to visual cues sort of route.
Hope I'm not rambling too much.
