"If enough time passes, you can start engaging in the behavior in a healthy way once again." Spoken like the author has never had someone close with addiction,

"If enough time passes, you can start engaging in the behavior in a healthy way once again." Spoken like the author has never had someone close with addiction, imo. You'll notice that actual medical professionals never are like "oh just quit your massively health-ruining addiction for several years then you're good to go potentially! Happens all the time, look at these studies." It's because such advice or facts--while technically true in a % of cases--downplay how devastating the next relapse might be for the addict (often it means death, or at the very least, their life ruined). Framing these things to addicts and individuals properly given their situations is very important, but has been totally bypassed by this author "helpfully." They present the article without mentioning their intentions or target audience too, which hardly helps. "So I dove deep into the topic and looked at what science says about it." So what credentials if any do they have at evaluating scientific consensus on addiction? Oddly enough the article includes some sources but makes no mention of who the author is from what I can see. Is this some high schooler's opinion after Googling around for an evening? We can't be sure. "This has some merit, for example, when it comes to alcohol - you can go from being addicted to alcohol, to having a social drink once a week." "However, that doesn’t mean you need to avoid the behavior forever." This author needs to like stop repeatedly emphasizing this stuff and muddying the waters--it HIGHLY depends. Again, this is spoken like someone who has never seen someone kill themselves young after that "one last relapse" because they thought they could control it finally. So this article comes off very poorly and I'm disappointed it got upvoted to be honest. Like, the lucky few addicts who recover and can moderate (& their loved ones) probably won't need this article. To the rest of the addicts and people who may be giving them advice, it seems to be a pretty irresponsible article to me.