Stavros: eight years dry, no recovery in it
Stavros has allegedly been clean for eight years, but Gately has his private doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved.
Context
The theme's abstinence-vs-recovery distinction given a live specimen. Stavros is eight years off substances and still a petty, exploitative man — billing the state for hours he doesn't work, cruising halfway houses for scrub-labor, screaming his one cruel "witticism" at broken men for thirteen months and counting. Gately's "private doubts about the spiritual quality of the sobriety involved" mark the line the whole theme draws: not-drinking is not the same as getting well. Dryness without the interior work leaves the Disease's character intact; the substance is gone but nothing has been recovered.