Addiction is a terrible, terrible DISEASE. And it is a disease. A treatable disease that must be worked at everyday. But you have to WANT to treat it. That's all. I won't debate the Freepers who will mock me for saying it's a disease. Those who know addiction will know what I'm talking about.
It is a disease..you are absolutelyt correct..and both the Mets and the Yankees were enablers..getting him to "clean up" just enough so that he could pitch another season..YOu have to hit rock bottom before you can start to pull yourself out of the hole, even with assistance, but they always gave him a soft landng...until now..Do you remember the Yankees' pitcher..I forget his name..who had like a dozen or so drug suspensions, but because he could get out lefties, Steinbrenner kept on giving him another chance..after chance, after chance..
AA and others have caused a lot of unnecessary mischief over the years by appropriating a term that has a long history of application to physical afflictions only. Even the use of the term "disease" in the wider world of mental illness is problematic. A disease, strictly speaking, is something like cancer, or the aforementioned chicken pox. The complex psychological syndrome of alcoholism may include disease like physical symptoms, especially in its latter stages, but it's primarily mental, i.e., an affliction of the brain, the most complicated known organ in the universe, and therefore far more intractable to treatment.
The real problem arises which individual brain users, i.e., alcoholics, use the term "disease" to sort of absolve themselves from participation in and responsibility for their own lives, as if a foreign virus entered their body and attacked their immune system. While it's true that the compulsion to drink becomes almost irresistable for alcoholics, the complex factors that go into that tortured compulsion are chiefly psychological, and not comparable to a virus.
And don't even get me started on all the "alcoholism is genetic" drivel so often bandied about by the substance abuse community, a community with extensive vested interests in the spread of all this inaccurate terminology.