I respectfully disagree. Addiction is not a choice or a disease - addiction is a feature. Modern life is the problem, not the innate compulsions of most humans.

Humans are hard-wired to seek out pleasure, it's the compulsion (or 'addiction' if you prefer) that has driven many of our successes as a species for 200,000 years at least. These pleasure-seeking compulsions work just fine in environments where pleasures are scarce and hard to come by. For example, honey is dangerous to obtain for hunter-gathers.

But in modern life, we have abundance of everything. Now we ask those among us with the most intense compulsions to suddenly control thousands years of evolution and development because out environments have suddenly changed. Remember, this environment of abundance is a sudden change compared to 1000s of years of scarcity, the default state of our species.

Addicts are the most human humans out there because they have the strongest desires to seek pleasure (and increase their chance of survival). It's the world that is 'diseased', not people with addictions.

If you wonder why many people do not become addicts, the answer is simple - they are weaker humans with weaker drives to survive. They would be out-competed by our modern-day 'addicts' if we existed in environments of scarcity rather than abundance.

The answer to addiction is to push those innate compulsions into pleasure-seeking activities that are more sustainable, such as creating art or worship for example.

The addictive personalities around us are the best of humans, we should honour them, not condemn them.