By Roland J. Branconnier, MA and Kelly A. Moncheski, BA


“In terms of prophecy…we are currently in an epoch of enormous change. The millennium has passed, and with it has ended the two-thousand-year-long astrological Age of Pisces-the fish, which is also the sign of Jesus. As any astrological symbolist will tell you, the Piscean ideal believes that man must be told what to do by higher powers because man is incapable of thinking for himself. Hence it has been a time of fervent religion. Now, however, we are entering the Age of Aquarius-the water bearer-whose ideals claim that man will learn the truth and be able to think for himself. The ideological shift is enormous, and it is occurring right now.” 
                                                                - The Da Vinci Code
                                  
History of addiction as a Disease:

According to Mosby’s Medical Dictionary (2009): "addiction [ədik′shən] is a compulsive, uncontrollable dependence on a chemical substance, habit, or practice to such a degree that either the means of obtaining or ceasing use may cause severe emotional, mental, or physiologic reactions."

British clergy in the early seventeenth century initiated the use of the term “addiction” to describe excessive consumption of alcohol (Warner, 1994). Consistent with the above definition, “addiction” was considered an obligation or devotion to something. 

Therefore, the term “addiction” became a metaphor describing a pathological preference for a given activity that lead to behave “as if addicted.” i.e. devoted to the activity.

There is an inclination for metaphors of this type to be reified, internalized and given causal significance (Sarbin, 1968).  This appears to happened with the term “addiction” that has progressed from being a metaphorical description of a devotion to a particular activity, to an internal state, the existence of which is revealed by the devotion and then to be cause of the devotion.

The result of this line of reasoning is a tautology where the “addiction” causes the “addiction” (Akers, 1991).  Despite this fallacious circular reasoning, in time, the characterization of “addiction” as a pathological preference gave rise to the notion that excessive use of alcohol was, in fact, a disease.

In the eighteenth century, the concept of alcoholism as a disease was articulated by Benjamin Rush, the Surgeon General of George Washington's revolutionary armies, in a pamphlet published in 1784 entitled: An Enquiry into the Effects of Spriuitous Liquors upon the Human Body, and Their Influence upon the Happiness of Society.

Rush was also one of the first to prescribe total abstinence from spirits as the sole remedy: "taste not, handle not, touch not." He saw treatment of drunkenness as a political issue (White, 1998, Barton, 1999).

The idea that alcoholism is a disease has always been a political and moral notion with no valid scientific basis. It was promoted in the United States in the early nineteenth century as a speculation based on erroneous physiological theory (Levine, 1978), and later became a mantra of the temperance movement (Gusfield, 1963).

It was resurrected in the 1930s by the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), who derived their views from an mixture of religious ideas, personal experiences and observations, and the unsubstantiated theories of the physician, William Silkworth (Robinson, 1979).

The AA doctrine won support in the 1940s when the scientist, E.M. Jellinek, published an elaborate statistical study of the "phases of alcoholism" (Jellinek, 1946).

He portrayed an inevitable sequence of ever more uncontrollable drinking that led progressively to such symptoms as blackouts, tolerance, and withdrawal distress, until the drinker "hit bottom" as a derelict, became insane, or died.

Jellinek's work seemed to put a scientific imprimatur on the AA depiction of the alcoholic. That was not surprising, since he had taken his data from questionnaires that were prepared and distributed by AA and answered by fewer than 100 selected members.

Jellinek later acknowledged the source of his data and expressed reservations about its scientific validity (Jellinek, 1960). Nevertheless, his characterization of the intractable alcoholic has become widely accepted and is now entrenched as part of American folk science.

Historically, the excessive consumption of alcohol has been considered a disease of addiction for over 300 years (Warner, 1994). Likewise, the disease concept of addiction has been expanded for the opiates and other now illegal drugs for 100 years (Levine, 1978) and for tobacco product for several decades (Henningfeld and Keenan, 1993).

Today, in the twenty-first century, the concept of addiction as a progressive, chronic disease remains an idea with substantial support in the recovery community. 

This belief persists despite substantial scientific evidence that significant numbers of addicts eventually Mature Out of addiction as they age (Granville and Cloud, 1999, DSM-IV-TR, 2000, Hester and Miller, 2003)

In the next section, we will review the evidence that supports this observation.