It's Not About Bad

"Badness" is not what defines how sick we are. It has very little to do with whether we are "addicts". Read the First Step of the Big Book of AA; the realizations that brought us here, were:

1- that our formerly trusted and depended upon behavior (using lust, alcohol, gambling, heroin, whatever) actually makes our lives unmanageable - it screws up our lives and the lives of those around us, and...

2- that we came to the conclusion that we cannot successfully stop. We do not have to prove that we cannot stop (how do you prove something that hasn't happened yet?), rather it is just as Rav Noach Weinburg would define beginner's Belief in G-d: "I have enough evidence to honestly accept that there really is a G-d."

In the same way, recovering addicts, have come to believe that he or she is an addict by weight of the evidence that they are not able to get better by their own power - after all, it was your/my very best thinking and efforts that got us exactly in this deep trouble, right? Wasn't it?

So to sum up, the definition of "addict" is exactly these 2 things, per my own experience. The behavior may have been "mild"... It's not the behavior that matters - it's what it does to your life that is the issue, to me. The pivotal point here boils down to pure (enlightened) self-interest; not morality nor even G-d's Will. This is plain to me, though others twist themselves into a religiomoralistic pretzel over it.

"Can I take it any more?" If I perceive that I can, and perhaps will be able to just stop tomorrow, then I will keep using my drug. Period. And that's what I call an addict. Like me.

So, what it all comes down to is either humility....or humiliation.