You would not know the clients whose alcohol usage wasn't causing issues. Therefore, although the frustrating bulk of alcohol users consume responsibly, your "scientific" image of what the drug does would be distorted by the source of your sample of drinkers. Treatment service providers get a similarly skewed view of addicts: the people who keep coming back aren't common they're merely the ones who require the most assist.This is one of numerous reasons I prefer to see dependency as a learning or developmental condition, instead of taking the classical disease view. If addiction actually were a main, persistent, progressive illness, natural recovery rates would not be so high and dependency would not have such a noticable peak frequency in young people.