My mother worked in a alcohol rehab center. People who drank up to 12L of wine a day (I still wonder how that works) would turn to window cleaning liquid on withdrawal.
She said no-one ever quit the alcohol addiction by choice, all of them were brought here by court, generally after killing people in an accident.
I sure hope people can quit alcohol addiction by choice. But you do need to rebuild all the friendships that only existed around drinking routines. I for one have quit a coworking space that revolved too much around beer. They were good business contacts and that is why itβs hard to walk away.
I'm suspicious of bold claims like that from people observing a selected subset of a population. An alcohol rehab center, particular the type that accepts people sentenced there by a court, is likely to get few to no voluntary patients. Therefore, somebody working there will only see the people who have a serious enough alcohol problem to get in enough alcohol-related legal trouble to get sentenced to go to rehab.
I've known some people who would probably qualify as functional alcoholics, and none of them have ever got into legal trouble for it. IME, you generally have to be a wildly out of control drunk to get into legal trouble from it regularly.
I've also known plenty of people who stopped or cut back alcohol consumption voluntarily, with no help from any organized programs. It's quite doable for many people, once you decide that you genuinely want to stop, though I acknowledge that some people genuinely can't. You may infact have to change friendships and routines if some of the old ones are too conductive to binge drinking, but do what you gotta do.
Breaking habits is hard, but usually doesn't risk hospitalization or death.