You smoked a couple of packs of cigarettes and quit. Are you implying that because you had such an easy time quitting, everyone else should too? That would be anecdotal, don't you think?

Coming from someone who used to smoke 2 packs a day, the addiction wasn't from the cigarettes themselves. It was from the life I had. I was depressed, had a dead end job, a shit relationship, family problems, etc. I tried to quit a number of times, but had many difficulties due to the fact that everything around me was constantly on fire.

I finally quit when things picked up. It was still a challenge going from around 40 cigarettes a day to none (cold turkey), and I ended up saying some things I definitely shouldn't have in the process, but I did it.

It's a similar story for many smokers. Also, if anything, it was blown out of proportion in the 90's. Things seem to have calmed down since then.

Addiction isn't that predictable. Lots of people can drink regularly and stop when they want to, lots of people can do cocaine a few times and not get addicted. That doesn't mean alcoholism and cocaine addiction don't exist.

By that logic I can say because I've been drunk a number of times in my life but are in control of the substance, I think alcoholism is blown out of proportion.

You're right! Now that we have one single data point, we can make a generalization about cigarette addiction as a whole! And now we can just forget about the many decades of research ACS and other organizations have done tracking millions of smokers around the world, because you are the only data point we need!!

Building tolerance and addiction is highly dependant on the individual, and so is quitting. Besides there's a difference between "a couple packs" and a long term smoking (at which point you're not yet that much addicted but smoke due to different reasons and get addicted in the meantime).

Same for me, but don't generalize - some people get easily addicted, some don't.

Yup and alcoholism isn't real because some people have a glass of wine with dinner.