Cigarettes really aren’t bad for you on a short term basis. So it makes some sense that, while even a modicum of good decision making (courtesy of the mentioned prefrontal cortex) could help you kick smack, deciding to quit smoking due to some nebulous fear of illness decades in the future might prove more challenging.
> ...some nebulous fear of illness decades in the future...
Old guy's perspective: Most of the family / friends / neighbors who I knew to be regular cigarette smokers 3-4 decades ago are now either dead, or suffer profoundly reduced qualities of life - generally due to lung cancers & other stereotypical "smoker's diseases". Not a random sample, and the value of n is too small to call it solid statistics, but...
It is fair to say that the prospect of lung cancer in one's 60s or bladder cancer in one's 70s is not going to impress every eighteen-year-old.
They are difficult to quit. My father took a good dozen years to quit, with repeated failed attempts. During one of the big takeover battles of the 1980s, somebody explained the desirability of owning a cigarette manufacturer: you make them for a dime, you sell them for a dollar, and people get addicted to them.
> ...not going to impress every eighteen-year-old.
Quite true. OTOH, I know a guy who was still a heavy smoker in his early 50's. Plenty to live for - corporate V.P. & rising, great girlfriend, his kids getting out of college.
If he had any interest in quitting, it was a well-kept secret.
~8 years later: After a few not-quite-good-enough attempts, his oncology team found a chemotherapy drug toxic enough to kill the lung cancer that had spread all through his body. Faced with "or die", and missing his oldest daughter's wedding day, he signed off on the side effect. Those were as advertised: He now lives in a hospice, and needs to a couple good, strong caregivers to safely get out of bed. On a good day. "Never really there for him" is a pretty accurate description of how well his brain is working, too.
The author thinks that maybe a addiction is a developmental issue, or a sort of learning disability and he questions the AA-informed "progressive disease" model of addiction. It's an important topic, and well worth discussing.
I don't know what I have to add to the discussion, though. I came from a pretty difficult childhood, with a fairly messed-up family. I live in an area with a lot of rehabs, and a lot of my friends, through the years, have been involved in recovery.
I'm comfortable around recovering addicts. I can relate to a lot of their experiences. I could have easily gone down that path. But, for whatever reason, alcoholism or addiction were never much of a problem in my life.
In some sense it must have seemed like a good idea during the active addiction. Why is it so hard to see the problem? The years of addiction (averages - cocaine, 4; marijuana, 6; alcohol, 15) -- that's a lot of years of destruction to rebuild from. That's a lot of, what, blindness? justification? lack of self awareness?
Happy for the author and some good points to consider as food for thought (however lacking in research on key points.) But reading between the lines, if the worst addiction did to him/her was dropping to 85lbs and getting kicked out of college for selling drugs, that pretty much indicates a pampered college kid who never truly worked for a habit and it gets SO much worse than that.
From at least my family / friends / neighbors experience, "growing out" does not apply to smoking cigarettes.