I have also been thinking and wondering about Alcohol being a Disease. I don't know, i will leave that to the experts to define and categorise it. To me it is a Dependency. Just like Drugs, Food, Smoking etc. People use, to get them through difficult times in life like a security blanket, once they find they enjoy the feelings they get from a variety of things they ingest. It is their stress reliever so to speak.
I also think that most of these things destroy our health, but then so does our toxic environment. Its all a matter of degrees to me. I see Cancer is very high amongst Westernised populations too, not just in adults but in very young children also. Unheard of when i was growing up, so what has changed? It has to be environmental the way i see it. The food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, all the toxins we ingest in a variety of ways. We are all being poisoned in a variety of ways, and our western cultures are one of the most unhealthiest in the world.
Jason, i think you are lucky that Alcohol did not destroy your life, because it does to many other people. Glad you could get control over it before it did any serious damage, as it does to so many others.
According to Stats. some 27,000 people in the U.S.A. die every year from Alcohol related deaths.