BBC NEWS | Talk about Newsnight | Who should pay? 20. At 04:43 PM on 12 Dec 2007, Andrew Dettman wrote: Addiction is a disease, a syndrome of various symptoms that relate back to a tap-root of meaninglessness and erroneous material or behavioural prioritisation within a personal or community expression. It is a disease that thrives in the fog of miscommunication and mixed messages. Approaches striving in all good will to provide solutions to alcohol addicts should beware of the quicksand of competing diagnostic and treatment models lest their efforts fall into the black hole of the very problem, addiction, that they are striving to alleviate. Not until the medical establishment more clearly recognises addiction as a disease, similar to the American approach, a disease with many forms and variations of which alcohol addiction is but one, shall policy makers be able to escape from the present dilemma within which the diseased tail is wagging the beleaguered dog of social policy. Alcohol is not the problem, it is the revealer of the paucity and hypocrisy of the inner state of too many individuals in our collective. Alcohol abusers are the boils on the face of our society. We either treat such spots topically and cosmetically and look for the very quick fix in policy terms that the addicts look for in substance terms, or we look deeper into the constitution of the body of our society to see where the ills really originate. That problem source has more in common with a personal Golden Calf than it has with a non existent political silver bullet.
As Carl Jung rightly said and I paraphrase, society is simply a collection of individuals, when sufficient numbers of individuals wish to change their inner worlds, then society changes.
