Breaking an addiction is painful. It may be the physical pain of heroin withdrawal, or the economic pain of a price increase to reduce oil consumption, or the consequences of a pest invasion while natural predator populations are restoring themselves. Withdrawal means finally confronting the real (and usually much deteriorated) state of the system and taking the actions that the addiction allowed one to put off. Sometimes the withdrawal can be done gradually. Sometimes a nonaddictive policy can be put in place first to restore the degraded system with a minimum of turbulence (group support to
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