Addiction can and is something people overcome every day! Sadly, its a terrible part of our lives, but was in the 1800s too, and I'm sure their were alcoholics and other types of substance abusers throughout history. People can get better and go on to have very productive lives! A lot of substance abuse is also an escape mechanism due to other issues (abuse being a huge one, but of course a whole slate of mental illness), but so many people do recover. I've seen all different methods in my volunteer work, the single point of commonality in all of them - aa/na, faith based, rehab, therapy, cold turkey, whatever - was that they wanted to quit. So many people end up in rehab that have no interest in quitting. I'm not saying by any stretch of the imagination that recovery is easy if you just "want to" but the people that are truly determined to stop, keep working at it until they can/do.