We see that you are passionate about your belief that addiction is a chronic relapsing illness. We even understand why you think it is. Our culture has been peddling this myth for decades, and so it is not surprising that you believe it to be so. But the research is definitive. In the appendices of The Freedom Model for Addictions,we address this myth in detail. Here are the first few paragraphs in this section, and as you can see from what we have researched – addiction is not a chronic condition or illness. Take a look:

“We hear all the time that “addiction is a chronic, relapsing brain disease,” and while we’ve taken on the disease notion in several chapters and thoroughly in appendix B, the “chronic” part of that statement is even more absurd. What is meant by chronic in the case of “addiction” is that it’s ongoing and consistently recurring and thus needs to be managed or attended to for the rest of your life. In other words, “once an addict, always an addict.” The recovery society compares addiction to diabetes, heart disease, or hypertension to convey this view. You don’t stop having diabetes; rather, you spend the rest of your life adjusting to it through diet and managing it with medications, and it continues to be a problem for you. Addiction, they say, is the same way. However, the data disagrees with this version of addiction.

Here are the rates of addiction to all substances, by age, from the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

The results of this survey are similar year after year, for every year it’s been done. What’s more, they’re similar to results found in other epidemiological surveys. The trend with addiction is that rates consistently go down as a function of age, and they go down sharply. Death rates do not even come close to accounting for this decrease in use. What this means is that people are permanently getting over their “addictions”, which indicates this is not a chronic condition. To be clear, people once classified as addicted aren’t continuously relapsing like recovery lore says they are. If this were the case, the rates would not go down with age, and they certainly would not go down so rapidly.”