There is nothing wrong with a temporary clutch. After all, and actually clutch doesn't cure someone's broken leg, but you wouldn't take it away from someone with a broke leg. A clutch gives people time to heal. This can do that too.
What I am saying is that if you coerce someone into getting out of an addiction that he got into because he has been having some frustrations with his emotional/social life, then you are just pushing the frustration relief that alchool has been giving him so far, into something else (another drug addiction, over-eating violence, ...).
You can't automagically fix the brain. We live by feelings, which are the world most powerfull "things", in both positive and negative sense.
If an alchoolist had by himself the means to rationalize why he is an alchoolist and what to fix in his life or mindset to not be one, then he would have stopped himself immediately.
But he got into this in the first place and because he has not stopped yet, it means that he has not yet achieved these understandings.
I am no psychologist here, just a random guy who, from time to time has been experiencing some time frames of deep demotivation and feelings of social inadequateness due to some parents relationship issues and probably a bit of over-sensitivity.
In those time frames alchool consumption got higher than average (but didn't reach an alchoolist level).
So I am just elaborating on what at that time would have meant to me to make me hate my only stress relief (which also worked to me as a little mood-booster to push me to have a bit more social life).
Where would I find another stress-relief ?
Inside myself ? I was not ready to understand myself, and sometime you just don't have around you the right friends or people who will help you doing that.
So I would have probably stuck to some other substance.
As for everything (and as we say many times for IT), when you don't know something, you don't even know what you don't know about it, and so wheter or not and where you need to search for help.
It's only now that I can rationally understand what was going on.
But at the time I'd probably told you that I had no issues, and that anyway, I was following a "right" path.
If I was a totally-alone person, if you had fed me that pill and wash your hands afterwards (which is exactly how modern-world government & health care systems would manage it) then you would have basically got me lost in some other psychologically wrong behaviour.
Not everyone is like me, I know, but I think that:
magic pill + hand washing = streets are clear from drunken people -> governent & lucky people are happier -> general society applaudes on itself for being able to defeat alchoolism plague -> unlucky people are just struggling somewhere else with other dangerous stress relief: bad habits, behaviours or substances.
At least alchoolism is visible, it's not hidden like some hard to see pathology with subtle or no symptoms at all, so let's use this evident symptomatology to cure the cause, and not the effects, let's just not hide them !
