Smoking is so addictive that I decided to quit overnight two and a half years ago, and did.
(I've had flirts with other forms of addiction that were much harder to overcome - is not an attempt to sound cool.)
What's called addiction with nicotine is mostly social reinforcement.
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Yeah, well, at that point you can call reading the newspaper an addiction.
If you do something most of your adult life, or, say, from a very young age, it's extremely difficult to shake that behavior.
A lot of the issues defining addiction come from the disease model, IMO.
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I had a friend back in Prague who'd been smoking since he was 11. Doubt he'll ever quit, even if he gets lung cancer.
Doesn't mean it isn't mostly social reinforcement for most people. But the younger you start, obviously, the more you have invested in it...
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Yeah, I was gonna add that the withdrawal symptoms for long-term smokers are obviously rather heavy.
For someone like me, smoking a joint or drinking two beers without chasing with vitamins and water would produce a worse hangover than quitting smoking (which gave almost none).
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(I should add I smoked 10-30 a day for two years, so I wasn't exactly a light smoker.)