by Robert Allen Savage

Created on: June 24, 2010   Last Updated: June 25, 2010

If you ask an addict or an alcoholic, the answer is definitely yes.  Maybe in the strictest sense of the word 'addiction” does not qualify as a disease, however as a recovering person I tend to find that my addiction caused as much damage as any disease I have come across. Medically it may not qualify, but socially it is definitely a disease, and quite a deadly one.

 Dr. Silkwood definitely thought of alcoholism as a disease, I would think that his opinion on the phenomenon of craving does in fact qualify it as such. Addiction which includes alcoholism has been debated for years, with one constant, those who suffer from it have no problem considering it a disease once they make a concerted effort to recover.

 I would like to point out that the majority of people who refuse to lend any credibility to addiction as a disease have no addictions, no experience in the field whatsoever, and speak from a position that is lacking in credibility. It would be the same as someone without cancer, who never watched anyone die from cancer claiming that cancer is not a disease. As certainly as cancer is a disease of the body, addiction is a disease of the mind.

 This is where the lines blur. People are willing to accept PTSD, schizophrenia, MPD and a laundry list of other mental diseases simply because someone with a degree who was able to prove through research these were in fact diseases of the mind. Addiction is hard to define and pinpoint because it does not just affect one area. It manifest at a physical, mental and spiritual level, leaving those it affects bankrupt and broken. If someone wants to think addiction is not a disease, then I suggest they go out and do what we in recovery call “research”. Go where I have been, do what I have done, if you walk away from it without the years of drug abuse, the drinking, the self loathing, the inability to stop based on willpower alone, then I will be willing to accept that addiction is not a disease.

 Until such a time as a person can prove to me that addiction is a matter of will power, and is simply based on overindulgence, I will side with the people who have been there and lived through it. In my eyes, and in the eyes of recovering people all over the world, it is a disease.

 Churches are full of people who do not want to go to Hell, the rooms of recovery are filled with people that have already been there.

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