From "Is Addiction Really a Disease?  A Challenge to Twelve-Step Programs," by Nicholas Grant Boeving at Tikkun: Let me preface this by saying that I write as someone who has struggled with these issues both as an academic and as someone who has lived in the prison of chemical dependency. I have experienced the despair of finding out I had an “incurable disease,” as well as the despair of being told it could only be arrested by a Protestant-by-proxy twelve-step program. I know as well the process through which disease-identity is cultivated within the walls of Narcotics Anonymous. I experienced firsthand how the disease of addiction is a cipher for all sorts of projections and even, to a certain extent, a symbolic transformation of the Devil himself into the language of medical discourse, echoing the ancient struggle of God, or a “Higher Power” with the Devil, or “the disease of addiction.”