Synanon

You're probably correct. There is now just too much corporate and special-interest money involved in the "addiction is a disease" phenomenon -- a concept that virtually every physician in the world was laughing at 40 years ago ... until the medical community and insurance community began to realize the amount of "free" money available if they could sell this scam successfully and incorporate it into law. Suddenly -- what a shock! -- the doctors, lawyers and insurance combines completely rewrote the scientific definition of disease to embrace those with no character or self-respect.

The laughable "success rate" of rehab is one of the best-kept secrets in the business, carefully camouflaged by not-very-careful followup ("if we don't hear about it, he never relapsed") or short followups ("3 years now, he must be permanently cured"). This holds true in both the alcohol and drug-rehab rackets.

And of course the success rate is cooked further by monitoring that is a joke among rehab participants. Getting past the pee-in-a-cup test is not much of a challenge even if you rode that little short bus to school regularly.

WTF. There's too much money involved to fix this appalling ripoff, where they steal from productive members of society to keep enabling the dregs.

[deleted]

I would be interested. I was a psych student while The Game was still an interesting phenomenon.