Yes of course there could be other entity that try to shift my perceived but its still on me to take that into account.

>Once you're hooked, it's no longer a fair fight

Life is never fair. if I have a susceptible personality, that mean I just have to fight it harder than other people.

This is only true at the very beginning of a smoker's habit.

I know a lot of smokers. Exactly zero of them are "willing" to trade the cost for the benefit, for any meaningful definition of "willing".

Addiction is hard. Many addicts rationalize, but few truly "choose".

For an addict it becomes not a choice, I'm not absolving every addict of everything ever but addiction really screws with your brain and if you have an addictive personality you can end up feeling compelled to do something even while fully accepting you'll feel guilty about it later.

From a technical & mechanical perspective the person has made a choice, from an agency perspective the scenario is less clear and we generally understand that intoxication (either through physical addictions or obsessions) can lower the responsibility of the party involved... and there are a lot of examples toward and against this point in society[1] but I don't think we can clearly consider this a choice.

1. For instance drunk driving is considered in the opposite manner where choosing to drive drunk assumes a greater responsibility, and implies a greater agency, on the actor.

The cost doesn't come until much later (sometimes never). Most smokers secretly hope they'll never have to pay the piper. For the majority of smokers, they are probably full of regret when the bill finally comes due and cuts their life 20 years short (and/or makes the last few years utter misery).