If it is a learned behaviour, then I must be the worlds fastest learner, lost control the first time I drank at age 10, and drunk everytime there after until I was almost on the grave at age 22.
AA calls it an illness BTW, and fundamental to AA experience is the loss of control and choice. One can run into problems with alcohol without losing either control or choice, and if one is lucky enough to be in that camp, it is pretty straight forward to just make a choice to stay sober, nothing else required.
In fact, reading about Towns Hospital and its policy regarding AA, they were quite selective in who they referred, sending only those they thought could recover on a spiritual basis. There seems to have been a great number of others that were helped by the then available therapy and treatment and were able to recover on a non-spiritual basis.
At the time this book was published I attended a talk on this very subject by the head of a research team based at the Otago Medical School. The talk cited findings that Alcoholism was a brain disease which could be seen on an MRI. Its causes were partly genetic, but also it needed an environmental element to kick it off, which explained why it sometimes skipped a generation.
The talk was about alcholism, and the word addiction was not mentioned as far as I can recall. The two things may be different. In my own case I suffered from alcoholism and nicotine addiction. The disorders were completely different in my experience, as was the recovery process.
It was an interesting talk not least because it introduced the concept of alcohol use disorder, which has a wide range of severity, there being specific and effective solutions available across most of the range, excepting the very severe chronic cases, which were a small minority.