a bill defining the addiction as a chronic disease

In 2007 in the USA they tried to pass a bill defining the addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disease.  This bill was lobbied by the initiative of Senator Joseph Biden Jr. from Delaware (https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/s1011). This fragment is our first approach to an interesting problem of medical labeling. The alcoholic addiction criteria are as descriptive as those of many mental disorders. If a person doesn’t worry of his/her drinking problems, if people around him/her don’t worry either, he or she may forever remain a mere drinker provided no account is taken to the abstinence symptoms, which make a “business card” of any addiction. By the way, the statistics shows that in the USA only 20 % of those who drink alcohol or even fit DSM criteria get treatment against the alcoholic addiction. But the addiction diagnosis opens new and uneasy prospects for the customers. For example, a possibility (in some countries even a right) to receive medical and psychological aid in fighting the addiction, which is treated as a chronic disease and can be treated endlessly. A most difficult set of questions is raised by labeling someone as an addict or an alcoholic. First and foremost of the question is to what extend a human corresponds the motto of Invictus, a well-known poem of William Ernest Henley:

I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

The problem isn’t in the complex relations between a human and alcohol: we don’t study master-slave relations in this article. An ill alcoholic is a person who lost control over himself/herself by definition. Therefore, joining any rehabilitation program is a consent to an external control of your personality and fate by default. Another thing is that most of the suffering ones take the above-mentioned rules just formally and don’t let anybody to their own minds and souls consciously or unconsciously. This may be the reason of inefficiency of such programs.