Although I think the disease model is wrong and destructive, there's a certain logic to AA's thinking that can't be easily dismissed. An addiction researcher p

Although I think the disease model is wrong and destructive, there's a certain logic to AA's thinking that can't be easily dismissed. An addiction researcher put it like this: > If the consumer's sole motive for changing his level of patience is to escape an allocation that is dictated by his first order preference (including time preferences), but that contradicts his second order preferences, he will not be able to achieve this by rational means. The researcher proposed that it might be possible to escape this conundrum by seeing patience as valuable in itself. If you only value patience because you'd like to escape your addiction in the long term, you won't succeed, because you do in fact value the thing you're addicted to more in the short term. Yet, can you just choose to value patience in itself? What things you value can force you to change the things you value? Isn't it all dictated by our biology anyway, even if it isn't a disease? There are a lot of paradoxes about willpower. It may not be something you can think yourself out of, no matter how smart you are. It's not really surprising Robert Smith threw his hands up and decided he needed a miracle/supernatural help to break out of it. But maybe this is all the more reason to try to solve addiction as a social problem, not on an individual level as a problem of willpower (or disease).