> Yes. It’s addictive. But personal responsibility is admitting you made bad choices that led to bad habits and only you, through your own effort, can fix it.

We don't trust kids with making contracts/permanent choices for good reasons. And it is easy to get roped into smoking to fit in as a kid. So, I disagree on it being a choice in all situations.

Do you say this to all addicts?

There are countless reasons people make bad choices: peer pressure, to calm anxiety, dealing with depression, and yeah, sometimes, abusive parents.

But you are refusing them their status of victim of circumstance and saying "well, sucks to be you", and taking the high ground. Good for you, it must be great up there never having made a bad choice.

The moment somebody makes a poor choice does not mean we should then insist the game is over for them and it's their fault. That doesn't help them make better choices in future.

Quitting smoking is incredibly hard. I've done it multiple times sometimes for years at a time - that's how hard it is - and you will never understand it unless you've personally suffered from addiction yourself.

Do you think the attendees at Alcoholic Anonymous who stand up and say "I'm an alcoholic and haven't had a drink in 25 years" are being absurd, or speaking to a truth about addiction? Why do you think smokers have an easier time of it?

I've not smoked in almost 6 years today. In a poor context, in a poor moment, I could be back in there in a heartbeat.

It's not insufferable - I've suffered it - but you clearly and blatantly will never understand it.

So please, get off the high horse, accept everybody makes poor choices in life, some of those can lead to a very tough addiction, and addiction can lead to poor health outcomes that are incredibly hard to resolve despite wanting to make changes for the better. A little more empathy could serve you well.

Adults are responsible for themselves, and smoking is absolutely a choice regardless addiction status.

If you can't control yourself and be responsible, you shouldn't be in the military let alone manning a submarine.

I kindly suggest that you google "Is addiction a choice?" and "Is smoking addictive?" and learn a few things before taking such an absolutely absurd high-ground devoid of empathy or experience of either subject from the perspective of the person addicted to smoking.

If the bar for joining the military or manning a submarine is that you had never made a poor choice in your adult life, it would be impossible to recruit. All humans make poor choices, and for all sorts of reasons. Smoking is just one example that many people - yourself included - seem quick to condemn without understanding.

I'm overly simplifying, but if policy is to not smoke and you can't (or refuse to) follow orders, you're out. Dishonorable discharge.

Adults are not children, much less military personnel. Smoking is a choice and you are responsible for your choices. "It's an addiction." is a lazy, irresponsible excuse and escape.

You're confusing new choices with consequences of previous ones. Taking up smoking when you're fully aware that your job prohibits you from smoking is a choice and you're right - "It's an addiction" would be a poor excuse.

Quoting the context from a few replies ago:

> You don't have to ban smokers to ban smoking on a sub. Smokers don't have to smoke, they merely choose to do so.

Being asked to quit an addiction on demand is completely different, you don't "merely choose" to smoke every day. That's what makes it so difficult to escape addiction, it's not merely a choice like what you're going to have for lunch. Once you're addicted, your body psychologically and physically compels you to do it.

Would you say that giving up your passwords under the threat of being beaten with a $5 wrench is merely a choice? Addiction is like that, but it's your brain holding the $5 wrench.

Do you "get asked" to serve on a submarine, or do you apply to serve on a submarine?

What next, are you going to obligate the military to provide all the alcohol and hard drugs any addict may desire in the next 6 months?

There's so many reasons you get disqualified from serving in certain positions in military. Being addicted is just one of them.

Please don't shift the goal posts, the argument I was responding to said that continuing to smoke is merely a choice. I'm not arguing that smoking should be allowed on submarines or anything of the sort, just dispelling this one specific falsehood that attempts to paint addicts as lazy or otherwise inferior just because they can't wake up one day and quit their addictive behavior.

> you are refusing them their status of victim of circumstance

smokers are not victims of circumstance.

Yes, they are.

We'll have to agree to disagree. I believe someone coming in contact with second hand smoke is a victim of circumstance, but someone doing the actual smoking did so on their own free will.

I'll repeat this again in the hope you'll reflect on it: your statement suggests you do not understand addiction.

Addiction subverts free will.

Smoking is no less a serious form of addiction than any other you can imagine, the only difference is the consequence to other people is curtailed in comparison.

Agree to disagree as much as you want: you come across as plain ignorant in the eyes of anybody who understands the issue.

> Countless people never smoked. Countless people stopped. Some people act like quitting smoking is some insufferable thing that others will never understand. Everyone has bad stuff they do that’s just as hard to quit.

While smoking is a choice, not all choices are the same. Not all choices are weighted by a chemical addiction, comparing quitting smoking to bad food or exercise choices trivialises it in an unnecessary way.

Breaking an addiction is difficult, but smoking is one of the hardest addictions to break. I would imagine that heroin is more difficult to quit, but I can't think of any other addictions that are as difficult to break as nicotine.

If you have no experience of this (and it seems that you do not so apologies if you do) then a simple way to understand how difficult it is quit is not to think of it as a single choice to make. Imagine making the most difficult choice of your life, against everything that your body and brain is telling you - something that requires an extraordinary act of will and self-faith. The reward for making the correct choice is not an end to the matter - it will push it to one side for about 15-20 seconds. Then another wave of chemical addiction will wash over you, everything in your life will pale into insignificance and you will be faced with exactly the same choice again. This will repeat without end, asleep or awake, until you break the first part of the addiction. It will only take two or three weeks of these constant life changing choices, and you must make the correct choice every single time, but it will feel like an eternity.

If you make it through that initial period then it gets easier, but that sequence of life-changing choices won't really end for about six months, although you will gain more confidence that you are making the right choice through that time.

Several years later you will reach a point where you no longer have to choose and you have genuinely become a non-smoker. It is a long difficult road, but it is possible and many people do it. Believing that is almost impossible while you are still addicted, and find that believe that you personally are mentally strong enough to endure that cycle of choice and longing is the most difficult step of all.

So, yes it is a choice - but that does not make it the same as other things that are a choice. Some choices are more difficult than others, and to put all choices into a single category and assume they are the same is to under-estimate the range of difficulty that exists across different choices.

Food is incredibly addictive. Sugar stimulates the same pathways as opiates and provides instant massive hits of dopamine.

Many people who manage to lose weight end up relapsing. Most people end up gaining all the weight back. [1]

It’s far higher than the relapse rate amongst former smokers. And really, just look at exploding obesity rates around the world.

Yes, smoking is a choice. Yes, people will mock smokers for crying and saying it’s not their fault. Yes, admitting personal responsibility and making personal effort is the best way to overcome it. Smoking is addictive, but so is loads of stuff. It sucks, but most people get through life choosing to never start.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5764193/

> Caffeine - never been an issue for me - I feel like it has no effect whatsoever. But the people who say "don't speak to me before I've had some coffee" certainly sound like I did when I was using cocaine.

I don’t have notable experience with addictive-type substances other than caffeine, but I can chime in there - I went cold-turkey from drinking 4-5 cups of coffee per day, and I was pretty surprised by how awful I felt the first day. Two days later I felt perfectly fine without caffeine.

Now I drink one cup per day, only before noon, often decaf. If I skip a day, I don’t notice any effect.

For me quitting smoking was much easier than certain other things that I haven’t been able to quit yet (eg social media and sugar). Smoking I just decided to stop one day and that was it.

So it probably varies a lot based on the person.

> I mean, unless as a child you had abusive parents who forced you to smoke, it’s absolutely a choice.

My mother started at 11. It's actually very typical for a smoker to start around that young. Many drug addicts are first exposed to the drug before their minds are anywhere nearly developed. They never had a chance to make anything like an informed adult choice. It's one of the saddest aspects of it.