Fairly offensive to actually sick people to call alcoholism a disease.
Lung cancer is a disease. It happens to you regardless of your actions. Alcoholism is knowing you're doing something wrong and choosing to do it anyway. Nobody ever got drunk by slipping and landing in a pool of vodka that they were forced to drink their way out of.
When I went through rehab, the "addiction is a disease" thing just gave a bunch of people who were desperate to have a beer yet another excuse to have a beer. They were ill. Wasn't their fault. It's just something that happened to them. The rehab model that shows much more results stresses personal responsibility. Gazza isn't ill. He's not a victim. He creates victims in his family and friends.
There's 100 choices that you make when you decide to partake in whatever substance is your thing. You get dressed, you find your shoes, you ties your shoes, you walk out the door, you walk to the top of the street, you turn right (etc), you walk into the offy, you head for the beer, you pick up the beer, you purchase the beer, you walk back, you sit down with the beer, you open the beer, you take a swig of the beer, you take another swig of the beer, etc, etc. There's 100 decisions that you have a yes or no choice to make and for you to not drink, you only need to say no once. People drink because they want to. They make active choices to do so.
Saying that people have a drink because of mental health or trauma is a cop out. There's millions with mental health or PTSD who don't decide to piss their lives away, it's another excuse and addiction thrives off people giving them excuses to use. Once I knew a lad who said that he went out and got sniffed up because he had an argument with his missus, with him thinking this is a perfectly valid thing. I asked him why he didn't bang his head against a brick wall after he argued with his missus. It's the same idea. He did it because he wanted to and now had a convenient excuse to do so.
Outside the physical addiction which can be managed under hospital care, quitting substance abuse is the easiest thing in the entire world. All you have to do to stop drinking is stop putting beer in your mouth. Or drugs in your lungs/nose/veins. This mass overcomplicating and babying is not helpful and more importantly, doesn't produce results. If Gazza wants to kick drinking then all he has to do, is to stop putting beer in his mouth. Everything else is window dressing.
