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This is general information about what addiction is and what recovery data shows. It is not treatment advice, and it does not describe what any one person should do. If this is about you or someone close to you, a doctor or a local service can do what a page cannot.
It is the commonest thing said to someone with an addiction, and the commonest thing they have already tried.
It is worth understanding why it misses.
Wanting something and liking it are handled differently in the brain, and repeated heavy use pushes them apart.
The wanting grows. The liking does not keep pace.
In a well-established addiction, what usually happens to enjoyment of the substance?
This is where the willpower story breaks down. It assumes someone chasing a good time who could simply choose to stop.
The experience described is closer to hunger than to fun.
The systems that weigh a consequence in the future against an urge in the present work less well under long heavy use.
The pull gets stronger while the thing that resists it gets weaker.
That combination is what makes it a condition rather than a habit.
Telling someone to just stop is asking them to win a fight where both sides have been adjusted.
It does not mean nothing can be done, or that recovery is rare.
The data on that is much more encouraging than most people expect.
Of US adults, how many have resolved a significant alcohol or drug problem?
That is a nationally representative estimate of people who once had a serious problem and no longer do.
Most of them are not visible, because resolving it is not a thing people announce.
The addictions you hear about are the ones still happening. The resolved ones are quiet by definition.
So the visible picture is systematically the worst of it.
Fewer than half of those people describe themselves as being in recovery. The rest resolved it and moved on without the label.
The identity and the outcome are separate things.
About half used some kind of assisted route. The most common was mutual-help groups, then formal treatment, then newer recovery support services.
Which means the other half got there another way.
There is no single door. Different people resolve this differently, and the absence of one route does not mean the absence of all.
That is a finding, not encouragement.
A nationally representative US survey. Whether the same proportions hold elsewhere is a fair question these numbers cannot answer.
Repeated use pulls wanting away from liking and weakens what resists it. That is why just stop misses. And about one in eleven adults has resolved a serious problem, most of them without anyone noticing.