The last time I checked the clinical field does consider addiction as a disease. Of course, one has a choice to pick up the bottle or snort the cocaine or pop the pills, but, they consider it a disease because an addict is not capable or does not have the normal ability to say no. Their body thinks it cannot live without the drug/alcohol/nicotine/etc. I have never felt the urge to do something so overwhelming that I couldn't quit, but I have friends who have had to seek professional help, and I can tell you that they don't feel they had a "choice". They felt the addiction consumed them. The statement in the post several posts back about addiction not being a disease is false.
More on the subject.
http://www.indiana.edu/~engs/cbook/chap6.htmlCHAPTER 6
Why We Should Reject The Disease Concept of Alcoholism*
Herbert Fingarette, Ph. D.
Why do heavy drinkers persist in their behavior even when prudence, common sense, and moral duty call for restraint? That is the central question in debates about alcohol abuse. In the United States, but not in other countries such as Great Britain (Robertson and Heather, 1982), the standard answer is to call the behavior a disease—"alcoholism"—whose key symptom is a pattern of uncontrollable drinking. This myth, now widely advertised and widely accepted, is neither helpfully compassionate nor scientifically valid. It promotes false beliefs and inappropriate attitudes, as well as harmful, wasteful, and ineffective social policies.
The myth is embodied in the following four scientifically baseless propositions:
1) Heavy problem drinkers show a single distinctive pattern of ever greater alcohol use leading to ever greater bodily, mental, and social deterioration.
2) The condition once it appears, persists involuntarily: the craving is irresistible and the drinking is uncontrollable once it has begun.
3) Medical expertise is needed to understand and relieve the condition ("cure the disease") or at least ameliorate its symptoms.
4) Alcoholics are no more responsible legally or morally for their drinking and its consequences than epileptics are responsible for the consequences of their movements during seizures.
The idea that alcoholism is a disease has always been a political and moral notion with no scientific basis. It was first promoted in the United States around 1800 as a speculation based on erroneous physiological theory (Levine, 1978), and later became a theme of the temperance movement (Gusfield, 1963). It was revived in the 1930s by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), who derived their views from an amalgam or religious ideas, personal experiences and observations, and the unsubstantiated theories of a contemporary physician (Robinson, 1979).
*This is a slightly edited version of an article in press to be published In The Harvard Medical School Mental Health Letter. By permission of Harvard University, copyright owner.
