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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

This is an absolutely ridiculous claim given the number of people I know who've had a first cigarette and not touched a second. Business Insider claims 76% of the population have smoked and 24% have become addicted, while 92% have consumed alcohol and 14% have become addicted[0]. That's nowhere near "almost everyone", it's 31%, and 15% for alcohol.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/most-addictive-substances...

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Addiction rates are lower than people think; heroin, even, is lower than you'd assume (the rate I remember seeing was about 25%, in-line with nicotine).

Of course, 1/4 is still a HUGE amount of people, and an absolute health crisis.

I think there's an important difference to make, I know a lot of people who have smoked once or a few times and have not become addicted but I don't know anyone who smoked regularly and didn't become addicted.

On the other hand for alcohol, I know a lot of people who will have a glass of wine whenever they go to a nice restaurant yet are not addicted.

So there's a magnitude of difference. Nicotine is significantly more addictive for anyone who uses it semi regularly whereas alcohol is not as addictive in that case.

"given the number of people I know who've had a first cigarette and not touched a second"

Okay, now exclude people who did that as children, an experience after which they had zero access to cigarettes. That same survey if demanding an adult experience would be much, much closer.

Everyone has a "Jimmy lit up a smoke and I took a drag and coughed my guts out when I was 9" story.

Overwhelmingly people either had a problem smoking (one that they had to quit through extreme effort), or they never smoked cigarettes at all as adults.

The one "exception" I can recall is a "social" smoker who would tell everyone that she controlled it by only smoking when she drank/at social events, a consequence of which was that she sought drinking opportunities at every venue. She was a problem smoker that turned it into also being a problem drinker.

I've smoked tobacco on somewhere between 5 and 15 occasions over a decade since becoming an adult, but I didn't become a daily smoker or addicted to smoking. Am I just an extreme outlier?

Another data point:

I'm some kind of introvert, if i hang out with people, my social "battery" drains and i get tired. I smoke because it gives me much more time before my social "battery" is empty. I don't smoke otherwise.

Right now i'm at two packs a year.

That sounds like a lot to me, almost once a week. Then again it's normal to drink that often without being considered an alcoholic.

A person would usually smoke more than one cigarette at an outing, so its more acute than chronic, I'd assume. Not sure what impact that would have in terms of health differences, but in terms of addiction potential it definitely would.

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