Re: Addiction is a disease?
Not all addictions are created equal, then. I was hooked on cigarettes for a decade, finally quitting in 1988. I spent this past October in Biloxi, Mississippi, doing hurricane relief work. Everyone there smoked, and it was a high-stress situation. It wasn't long before I started smoking again, too.
Just before I boarded my plane home, I threw away what remained of my cigarettes. There is no room for smoking in my home life. I resigned myself to a week or two of misery until the nicotine fits passed.
To my complete surprise, they never arrived. I noticed when the effects of my last cigarette wore off, but I never felt any of the shaking and nervousness that I remembered from my many earlier attempts to quit.
N.B.: Some addiction and recovery experts would not describe my physiological dependence on cigarettes in my youth as an "addiction"; under a widely-used definition, for a condition to be an addiction it has to have an immediate negative impact on one's life, relationships, or work situation.
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