I have spent a significant part of the day trying to understand this Nature Reviews Neuroscience article on the transition to compulsion in drug addiction.

Here is a very short, politically incorrect, thread about what I think about it. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41583-020-0289-z

This article contains many insightful nuggets, but, overall, it is a disapointing soul-searching endeavor that seeks an elusive middle path betweeen the Scylla of compulsive drug habit and the Charybdis of compulsive drug goal.

It relaxes the concept of compulsion to such an extent that this concept becomes nearly empty. Apparently, compulsion now depends on so many environmental and contextual factors that it is no longer, it seems, an individual dysfunction.

It also contains some remarkable "heresies." Just to give an example that I found particularly unpalatable. It affirms that escalation of drug use would be a consequence of addiction-like behavior.

The problem is that the latter is seen in less than 20% of individual animals (only one study reported that) while the former is typically seen in the large majority (typically here means a hundred of studies).

This being said, I admire the ingenuity and audacity that the authors have deployed trying to reconcile the neurobiological lessons of the oDASS model and those of the so-called seeking-taking chain model of addiction. However, in the end, it is difficult not to be confused.