Not really a parallel; you'll never meet a long-time cigarette smoker who doesn't know how awful a habit it is, although you'll probably meet some who will lie about it.

On the other hand -- and I say this as a smoker, albeit as one who's cut back his habit to almost nothing over the last couple years -- smoking is an awful habit, which is both severely addictive and without meaningful benefit for the person with the habit or for anyone else. So I suppose I'm not all that inclined to quibble about the not-quite-perfect parallel, after all. :)

In other words. The parallel is perfect.