They’re screaming it from the rooftops: “addiction is a disease, and you can’t stop it without medical treatment”! But why are they screaming it so loud, why are they browbeating us about it, why is it always mentioned with a qualifier? You don’t hear people constantly referring to cancer as “the disease of cancer” – it’s just “cancer”, because it’s obvious that cancer is a disease, it’s been conclusively proven that the symptoms of cancer can’t be directly stopped with mere choices – therefore no qualifier is needed. On the other hand, addiction to drugs and alcohol is not obviously a disease, and to call it such we must either overlook the major gaps in the disease argument, or we must completely redefine the term “disease." Real Diseases versus The Disease Concept or Theory of Drug Addiction In a true disease, some part of the body is in a state of abnormal physiological functioning, and this causes the undesirable symptoms. In the case of cancer, it would be mutated cells, which we point to as evidence of a physiological abnormality, in diabetes we can point to low insulin production or cells, which fail to use insulin properly as the physiological abnormality which create the harmful symptoms. If a person has either of these diseases, they cannot directly choose to stop their symptoms or directly choose to stop the abnormal physiological functioning, which creates the symptoms. They can only choose to stop the physiological abnormality indirectly, by the application of medical treatment, and in the case of diabetes, dietetic measures may also indirectly halt the symptoms as well (but such measures are not a cure so much as a lifestyle adjustment necessitated by permanent physiological malfunction). Scientist are stating outright that the reason addiction is considered a disease is because of the brain changes evidenced by the brain scans they show us, and that these changes cause the behavior known as addiction, which they characterize as “compul