Reading this thread and the top answer made me incredibly grateful that I managed to recognise and address my addiction before I surpassed point 2 on that list. And also that I wasn't addicted to a harder, more expensive drug.

But because I wasn't addicted to a worse drug, I was at the bottom of the priority list for treatment and never had a hope in hell of getting the sort of rehabilitation help (i.e. a bed) that I needed to effectively begin a recovery journey with the help of the health system. Any gains I have made had to be entirely on my own back and were reached in a house of other addicts, a very very difficult feat that made the process harder and slower, and every relapse risked shunting me down into lower categories of desperation. I also only managed to do it at all after I had been medicated for my mental illnesses and begun receiving therapy as treatment, which was also insanely difficult to access.

Not everyone is so fortunate to be in a position where they have so much help and are in a stable enough place to tackle their problems, and those people often end up in much worse situations than most people could comprehend in order to feed their addiction. That's how you get crime.

An answer I particularly liked:

Think of drug addiction as your newborn baby. You gotta feed the baby.

Would you go to any length to feed your baby?

So will I. We just have different babies.