cure by excess: the terminal-binge logic — "He’d cure himself by excess…"

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.