as for the rest, it reads much like the rest of the sensationalism typically heard when the general public funds out about a new drug of abuse for the first time. if you wanted to write a piece like this, I doubt it would be hard to find a handful of people who became severely addicted to alcohol from the first sip.
and I suspect you will want to split hairs with me on what exactly "casual vs addicted" means, but the figures I can easily find suggest that opioids have a similar addiction risk versus alcohol. it's hard to find a good denominator for casual opioid users, but this [0] study puts the rate of addiction among PM patients around 10%. meanwhile, about 10% of Americans over 12 years old develop alcoholism [1]. not quite an apples to apples comparison, but the raw "addictiveness" is likely within the same ballpark.
[0] https://journals.lww.com/pain/Abstract/2015/04000/Rates_of_o...
[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/alcohol-abuse-statistics/
You also need serious abuse with alcohol to get to a point where you are spending every paychecks on booze and become non-functioning like the people that are described in the article. Alcohol addiction does not happen over a week.
Finally it all comes down to the ratio of casual users vs addicted users. Millions (perhaps billions) of people drink alcohol and a fraction have serious addiction issues with it. Same goes for caffeine. They are not comparable.