The medical community, and society as a whole, have allowed their biases in regards to addiction to twist their reasoning to the point that it's barely recognizable as logic anymore. First, we tell people that they are suffering from a disease, and that they must go to "treatment" to get better. Then, we lock them away from their family for 30-90 days, and tell them that the only way they can "get better" is by admitting their faults, and turning their life over to a "higher power". Then, when the person leaves treatment and almost inevitably "relapses" by returning to chemical use, instead of admitting that the cure is ineffective we instead blame the patient, basically saying that they didn't pray hard enough for God to cure them. Anyone proposing such a scheme to treat depression, schizophrenia, cancer, or any other disease - mental or physical in nature - would rightly be laughed out of the room; yet somehow this passes as the "cutting edge" in the treatment of chemical dependency.

I'm not trying to knock 12-step programs; I understand there are hundreds of thousands of people who have been able to successfully use these programs to make substantial changes for the better. But there are millions of people for which this approach fails, and I see the medical communities wholehearted endorsement of this as a legitimate medical intervention nothing short of a cop-out for their failure to develop an effective science-based solution to the issue.