cure by excess: the terminal-binge logic
He would smoke it all even if he didn’t want it. Even if it started to make him dizzy and ill. He would use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforward modified, he’d never even want to do it again because the memory of the insane four days to come would be so firmly, terribly emblazoned in his memory.
Context
The plan for quitting is itself the disease's masterpiece: he will conscript discipline, will, and persistence — the whole vocabulary of recovery — into the service of one more enormous consumption, reasoning that a binge horrible enough will inoculate him against wanting the thing again. Sobriety recast as a feat of using; the mission to smoke thirty grams a day so it will finally be unpleasant enough to stop.