Re: I understand what you say, Trapper, but...

To me, addiction means looking at that drink and thinking, "I swore to myself I would only have one!", or similar experiences with other things. If one drink leads to other drinks despite your intentions, you have a physical craving for alcohol. If you just have that -- if your self-knowledge is enough to make you not have the first drink, you do still have a choice. The second criterion is mental, which is the obsession. With alcohol, as I suspect it is with food for many people, you long to control your consumption but you can't. That is where the God part has to come in.

I have a friend in both alcohol and "health" recovery who swears that his several years of liver flushing, chelation, Amalgam removal, etc. have taken away the craving mechanism. i.e. that he could probably take just one drink, or do one line of cocaine, or whatever. He thinks, as Trapper mentioned above, that the toxins in our bodies produce the physical longing for the substance, and that when you clear out the toxins enough the addiction will stop.

But it really is the spiritual malady that gets treated when we are doing 12-Step, etc. (i.e. the underlying causes and conditions).

I am so glad my new addiction is to cayenne pepper....