He quit three weeks later. Lots of people will have similar stories about tobacco.

Whether it's physiologically addictive or 'merely' psychologically addictive is somewhat irrelevant - are you going to belittle gambling addiction as just a "bad habit"?

Yes it's hard to generalise of course. But the (lack of) success of quit smoking interventions should tell you that it is different to what is described here.

I don't think it is irrelevant. The point is about how to help someone. Trying to get someone with a physiological addiction to realise the error of their ways is futile, like telling someone to unbreak their leg.

> But the (lack of) success of quit smoking interventions should tell you that it is different to what is described here.

It might tell you that it is quantitively different, but not necessarily that it's qualitatively different.

> Trying to get someone with a physiological addiction to realise the error of their ways is futile, like telling someone to unbreak their leg.

I think your understanding of addiction is probably lacking here. Many people can and do overcome physiological addictions due to some or other realisation. Conversely many people cannot overcome addictions without a physiological component, like gambling, regardless of how much they realise the error of their ways.

It isn’t necessarily black and white. Gambling has a physiological component. Dopamine agonists can cause compulsive gambling in people that never cared to gamble in their lives, due to purely biochemical alterations in reward pathways. I don’t hope to define psychological addiction as you put it. The distinction to me lies between physiological addictions and other compulsive habitual behaviours. Examples of the latter include things which are clearly not addictions, eg cracking your knuckles, checking you turned off the stove 5 times. Marijuana doesn’t have a big physiological component in general. As always, some people quite happily perform behaviours habitually but are not addicted (eg some smokers).