Yes, drug addiction is a mental illness; an unfortunate side effect of choosing to do drugs, so please do not continue to enable this behavior by calling it mental illness. It's a disgrace to people who actually have mental illness and cannot prevent it. We have been down this path with our daughter and an addict is an addict. They are no longer the person that you once loved. Kudos to Troiano for putting it point blank, which no one ever likes to hear. They will not change unless they want to and would you want to live in a neighborhood with a recovery facility? I certainly wouldn't.