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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Again, it's a question of how you model addiction.
The disease model is held to by many. I know some addicts consider it humanizing.
I personally think it's both dehumanizing and deeply flawed, but YMMV. I also think "addiction" holds at least two or three different phenomena.
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Ya mon. My tweet was definitely not entirely nuanced.
There's a much wider discussion that needs to be had about addiction, here.
But the physiological stuff and serious psychological attachment take a long time and/or early exposure to develop, for pretty much everyone.
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Contrast this with friends who have become addicted to MDMA because the first high was so great, and then the first withdrawal hit like a truck.
That's a pretty fucking strong reinforcement mechanism.
For smokers, you feel like puking and get severely dizzy, with no real high.
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Then you have years and years of constant tobacco use before you get any serious withdrawal symptoms.
I had barely any, and I must have smoked around 10000 cigarettes in just a couple of years.
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So much as we may find a lot of long-term smokers who have much steeper costs for quitting, most people my age who say they're that addicted?
They just don't want to quit (I didn't, for a long while), and/or they are caught in social circles that encourage smoking (as I was).
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IMO (from having read quite a bit about it), most addictions are more or less a matter of choice.
It's the notion that choices are "free" that creates problems with accepting that model, and stigma attached to operating under it.
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"They are choosing this," absolutely does not mean "they could just stop choosing this if they were a better person/had more willpower".
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To riff off @Grimeandreaso, you get the good ol' neoliberal hegemony sweeping in and using these "free choices" as an excuse to punish addicts.
Instead of admitting that these issues are all complex and require individual care, every interested party has a vested interest in BS.