Finished a really interesting book called "Dream Land" by Sam Quinones on Audiobook (Has a really good narrator as well Neil Hellegers) and this was something in the book that was eye opening to me (a lot of the book was) :

"Matt’s death had led them there. The Schoonovers took it as a calling. They once thought
addiction a moral failing, and now understood it as a physical affliction, a disease. They had
thought rehabilitation would fix their son. Now they saw relapse was all but inevitable, and that
something like two years of treatment and abstinence, followed by a lifetime of 12-step
meetings, were needed for recovery.
After kicking opiates, “it takes two years for your dopamine receptors to start working
naturally,” Paul said. “Nobody told us that. We thought he was fixed because he was coming out
of rehab. Kids aren’t fixed. It takes years of clean living to the point where they may—they may
—have a chance. This is a lifelong battle."

It actually correlates pretty well with another interesting point in another book that I am reading right now called "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. In that book he talks about how environment greatly shapes our actions.

He shares a story about how some congressmen were visiting some troops in Vietnam and shocked to learn "that over 15 percent of U.S. soldiers stationed there were heroin addicts. Follow-up research revealed that 35 percent of service
members in Vietnam had tried heroin and as many as 20 percent were addicted..."

"...Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely upended the
accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers who had been heroin users
returned home, only 5 percent of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12 percent
relapsed within three years. In other words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used
heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight."

"...Robins revealed that addictions could
spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers
spent all day surrounded by cues triggering heroin use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed
by the constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who were also heroin
users, and they were thousands of miles from home. Once a soldier returned to the United States,
though, he found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context changed,
so did the habit."

"Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone becomes addicted at home or
with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean—which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that
prompt their habit—then returns to their old neighborhood with all of their previous cues that
caused them to get addicted in the first place. It’s no wonder that usually you see numbers that
are the exact opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Typically, 90 percent of heroin users
become re-addicted once they return home from rehab.
The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs about bad habits because it
challenged the conventional association of unhealthy behavior as a moral weakness. If you’re
overweight, a smoker, or an addict, you’ve been told your entire life that it is because you lack
self-control—maybe even that you’re a bad person. The idea that a little bit of discipline would
solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture.
Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists analyze people who
appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from
those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time
in tempting situations."

"The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s
easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance,
grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by
wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment."