[Legate of Amon Lanc]

I agree with the points that Mithadan has raised and that Inzil mentioned in his last post; the Ring certainly is something deeply supernatural, it is a powerful object made by the Dark Lord and so forth, so obviously there is more to it than "our common" drug addiction (although in regards to one person's life, there is little difference in how destructive they can be. They just are).

However, out of the posts above I find myself agreeing the most with what Galadriel55 and Pitchwife had mentioned here. I, personally, do see the description of the Ring's destructive addictive power as something we can relate to simply as humans. I have always seen it as one of the things in which art, a story, a metaphor, can be million times more accurate than a scientific paper. Simply because art gets in touch with us and describes - no, shows - us things in a manner we can all relate to. Yes, I believe Gollum's case is so clear and very perfect copy of how an addict's life might look like. But I don't think that required any experience with meeting morphine addicts from Tolkien (whether he actually did have any or not, I am not here to judge that), or any weird supernatural precognitions of what science is about to discover (that, in my opinion, would be venturing into a very dangerous territory). Addictions, like Pitchwife said, have existed since the dawn of mankind (and probably before), and it is just something each of us can have some intuitive idea of, because we all have the potential for it (if potential is a good word to use, I'd rather use some negative word).

There are other dimensions to the Ring, like it promising people something they crave for and twisting them according to their original ideals etc., but I wouldn't mix that with the addiction part. That has nothing to do with it, in my opinion. That is merely the way the Ring demands the "addict's" (bearer's) attention, but that doesn't change anything about the mechanism of the addiction, which is the same like of any other drug. Alcohol addiction makes you crave for alcohol, sex addiction makes you crave sex, opium addiction makes you crave opium, the Ring addiction makes you crave the Ring - wishing to have it in your pocket, on your finger; and then also to use it. What exactly do you use it for - whether to become the king of Gondor, to eat all the fishess in the world, to make Mordor a garden or whatever - is simply the "bonus" of the fact that the Ring adapts itself to the user, which a bottle of wine can't do. But the mechanism behind it doesn't change; if a bottle of wine was more clever, it could work the same way.