Honestly, after developing a bad alcohol habit for awhile, I question a lot of the accepted wisdom of what constitutes addiction. There's a huge contingent of people in the recovery industry who claim that drug and alcohol addiction is a 'disease', but in opposition to that line of thinking are other psychologists and scientists who disagree with that designation. To those that don't accept te disease model, alcohol and drug addiction is a matter of maladaptive behavior. People make a choice, and because of the degree of physical dependency involved in drug use those bad choices are hard to break out of. The bottom line though, is we have a choice, no matter how hard it is to make it in the face of a powerful substance and ingrained behaviors. I do think that people need guidance when they develop these types of addictions, but not the type that is commonly recommended and proscribed for addiction (namely treatment and recovery centers). For me the thing that helped me the most was seeing a counselor and figuring out why I behaved the way I did, and how to make changes to my thinking to stop engaging in those behaviors. This entire country really needs reckoning to change how we deal with and overcome addictions and the way we think about them, as the way they are currently thought about is at best unhelpful, and at worst, dangerous.