Addiction is a disease of fundamental irrationality. Few indeed are the practicing alcoholics who have any idea how irrational they are, or seeing their irrationality can bear to face it

 The emotional brain circuits hijacked by drug abuse overpower rationality in the addict brain, resulting in the irrationality of the disease. AA says that alcoholism, and by extension any drug addiction, is fundamentally irrational, a form of insanity characterized by denial. 

As the The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions puts it, “Few indeed are the practicing alcoholics who have any idea how irrational they are, or seeing their irrationality can bear to face it.”
Losing control over drinking or drugs — obsessive use despite the recognition in some small part of your mind that you must stop or die — means that willpower alone cannot restore control because a rational approach to an irrational problem can’t work. Once you’ve lost the ability to regulate drug use, the Big Book says, “probably no human power” can revive it. That’s why AA looks to a ”Power greater than ourselves” for a solution.
Many addicts find the assertion that they’re insane, and AA’s reliance on a Higher Power and a spiritual solution, to be a huge obstacle. Calling it a Higher Power instead of God can seem like a distinction without a difference.

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