If I may interject: it's addict in recovery. You never stop being an addict, you just work through recovery. Don't be a douche nozzle, some of us work hard for this.
YOU may never stop being an addict, but not everyone feels that way. Some recovery programs follow the theory you will always be addicted, but not all of them do.
I see that the statistics show that when someone is sober past the 3-5 year mark, the likely hood of relapse is significantly lower but no solid evidence for what you stated.
Quite often one addiction is replaced with another. Would you say that someone who stops using drugs but is now aimlessly shopping or carelessly binging video games is recovered?
What if they just move to insert a different addiction here? The “psychological impulse to keep the [first] addiction alive” isn’t there anymore. Is this person’s recovery complete?
Then yes, they are still an addict. But they are addicted to something else. Their recovery has started again, but with a new vice that requires a new approach for recovery.
What if the “new vice” is something more socially acceptable, say like coffee or chocolate?
I know lots of people who would be labeled an addict if their coffee/sugar/tv consumption was replaced with something else.
Is the addict not an addict now because they can say “I’m just a big coffee drinker like those guys at the office”? Or “So what if I watched 9 whole seasons of Doctor Who in only 2 days”?
I kinda agree with you, but also understand that a big part of addiction is psychological, people need ways to quantify and explain things easily to themselves.
So by telling yourself “it’s an incurable disease,” “a deadly allergy” or as a “cancer that’s gone into remission” but never cured it psychologically keeps people in the mindset to stay aware of consequences for their actions.
Same reason imo many recovery programs innocuously tie into religion/higher power stuff, it’s to give you a moral base so you start thinking more about actions and consequences.
Then you have the ones that go with the belief that it’s your willpower that got you into this mess so you can get yourself out.
At the end of the day it’s all basically saying the same thing but using different tact to get the message through people’s thick skulls and if it works it works so I don’t knock it.
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u/ReverendDS 22h ago
Didn't he go from drug addict, to drug addict comedian, to atheist firebrand drug addict, to drug addict movie star?