My view is that:Drug addiction, which includes alcoholism, is not a disease. Disease implies a disease transmitter, something like a virus or bacteria infecting you and making you susceptible to taking drugs. This is highly unlikely (but it may be possible, I've just never heard of such a thing). People veer off into semantics that aren't accepted definitions of words, it isn't helping anybody to do that.That drug addiction isn't a disease doesn't imply pine is callous or cruel, I'm not saying there is no problem. Drug addiction is an illness, not all illness are diseases. Mental illnesses, such as depression, are real, but we do not categorize depression as a disease. The vector for illnesses of these kinds is more abstract than a biological virus or bacterium. If we were talking about a computer network you might say a mental illness or drug addiction is at the application layer and diseases are more low level, at the network level.I do not think using the word 'disease' improves communication that there is a problem. In fact people will take it less seriously if you conflate disease with addiction. I think people who use this word for their addiction are trying to say: "This is real problem for me and I'm not ok with it", but this is too painful to say out loud without feeling insecure so a 3rd party receives the blame: the Disease. In the case of psychoanalytical rubbish "Mom and Pop" replace Disease, something I regard as reprehensible. Yeah, sometimes people really suck, now what? Maybe later on other smaller human beings think you suck too. Nobody's remotely close to perfect. Forgive yourself, forgive other people and move on. Get help if that's what you need.Everybody screws up at some point in their lives. That is ok. It is not ok to pretend you never screw up and it's always something or somebody else's fault, that is dishonorable. The center of gravity for things that affect our lives act like concentric circles surrounding yourself. Primarily, you affect you and everybody and everything else is secondary.Secondly, even the word addiction itself is controversial because it has different levels to it depending on what drug you're taking.If you're taking weed or MDMA on a event basis, like a party or a festival, this cannot be categorized as addiction. You might as well say a weekly Friday visit to a KFC is an addiction to fried chicken at that rate.If you're taking MDMA and smoking joints every day and living paycheck to paycheck to do so, then yeah, you have a problem. However at this point I must point out that you're not actually addicted to weed or MDMA physically. You are experiencing psychosomatic addiction. You are doing it because it brings you (short term) pleasure. It is similar to a glutton gorging themselves, a gambler going to the races or an anorexic purging, it brings momentarily pleasure. There is a cycle, a habit you need to break here to progress financially, socially. This is nothing remotely like physical addiction to opiates or methamphetamine. This is addiction of an entirely different order. Physically addictive drugs are far more sneaky than purely psychosomatic addictive ones. I do not know many people who can take heroin periodically and then stay off it by sheer dint of willpower. Like I said, it is sneaky.Here is where I take a sort of reverse Non Aggression Principal (one shouldn't initiate violence) with drugs. If taking drugs is a voluntary choice it is not coercive and so it should be a free choice. Taking heroin the first time is a free choice. It is not a free choice when you cannot stand up without retching and your life is based around obtaining more heroin. That is chemical coercion, it doesn't violate NAP at the start, but in the end it does. It is kind of the reverse of the NAP principal in that way. The majority of drug consumers understand that degrees of addiction exist, which is why the proportion of drug consumers who smoke weed is enormous in contrast to the number who smoke crack. I would never advocate anybody take crack cocaine, methamphetamine or heroin, or indeed any opiate outside of strictly controlled dosages for pain relief. So I don't sell them. Your decision to take them is indeed a free choice, but if you keep taking them eventually it won't be. Then you don't have a right to take more heroin because you're not making a voluntary choice. I mention the opiates but I could just as easily have mentioned prescription drugs because more people are physically addicted to those.Free choices we make in life have something in common. Over long periods of time they trend to making our lives better. New ideas, new friends. But with free choices you have hazards, and physically addictive drugs are a pretty darn well known hazard.Finally I do not believe there is a gene for 'addiction'. I believe some people may be more genetically prone to addiction because they have low impulse control. Addiction is just one of many side effects of poor impulse control. The good news is that there's lots of ways you can combat low impulse control. Scientists for example, have shown if you take one of those wrist exerciser tools and flex it for 10 or 20 minutes, your propensity to give in reduces considerably. This is only partly genetic, it is also environmental. By controlling your environment, your behavior, you can eventually attain levels of self control that people with average amount of impulse control find extraordinary. So you can learn from weakness and become a better person. There are lots of tools and techniques, such as time lock safes, having yourself to report to somebody else and so on, which can allow you to master impulse control. You don't need to be a Buddhist monk or sit atop a snowy mountain to reach such conclusions, almost everybody has some habit they want to kick, drugs are just a specific genre.That's my $0.02.