I mean it's also worth looking at such 'illnesses' as self-enslavement - and I don't mean to be substituting one perspective for another - both are important in any treatment - this is not either/or.

@faraday: I agree with you about addiction as illness etc. However, I do think that recent, especially US, concentration on seeing many things as 'illnesses' sometimes leads to the idea that they should not be considered responsible for their own behaviour, and that going too far down that road can lead to complete irresponsibility and denial of the idea of human freedom/responsibility entirely. Easy enough to look at past events & analyze them in terms of cause/effect - but in the present, where we all always are, choice and self-direction are necessary or we simply reduce both ourselves and others to the status of objects - e.g., we are no longer human.
OK, this leads off into philosophical considerations and perhaps too far from the subject at hand to go into in detail here - however, I think they're relevant. Addiction is not freedom, but self-deception: the addict CAN stop, can choose to stop, often, perhaps, tells himself he IS stopping - but he doesn't, may tell himself he CAN'T; lies to himself. I speak as a nicotine addict. Cf. J-P Sartre's concept of Bad Faith.

@HFCampo: I suggest that if we can't come up with something a bit more original then we all drop it, or start a forum, where I can tell you about my fantastic acid trip of many years ago, which I've never regretted; as well as another one some time later that was a real horror show. I would suggest that most such stories that people might tell will be a lot less dramatic or important, and quite a few might be funny.
At any rate, enough with the idea of a 'war on drugs'. Problems not all solved absolutely, finally and forever, with an iron hand? Then it's like almost everything else. And iron hands usually turn out to be bigger problems than the ones they are supposed to deal with.

@HFCampo: Your major argument was that drug users should be killed - you lost that one.

You affirmed that rehabilitation of addicts was just a matter of substituting one addiction for another.
Now you seem to be saying that all rehabilitated addicts are a-holes, offering no proof.
Are you still saying that you have some solution to 'win' some 'war' on drugs? If so, what is it? If not, then you're simply pointing out that illegal drug use - defined as using drugs that evil governments decide should be illegal - can involve lots of problems. Fine: I think we can all agree to that, and then argue about the details if we want to; we could also discuss possible advantages to the use of some drugs. But I doubt if this is the place to do either.

Yeah - follow the money, and see who's got expensive new cars.