Coffee has similar withdrawal symptoms as sugar: huge headaches, cravings, and feeling like shit for two weeks. I'd say alcohol is way easier to quit for example.

On what basis? Alcohol withdrawal is pretty bad (life threatening).

Try this for starters: https://www.google.com/search?q=substance+withdrawal+compari...

Mostly personal experience :) I have stopped drinking alcohol for a year, coffee a couple times for few weeks at a time, and sugar for couple days at most. Never tried smoking though.

IMO drinking both coffee and alcohol casually leads more easily to a coffee addiction, but without you noticing.

there's a long road between "giving up drinking" and lethal DT's.

First you'd have to motivate why a person should quit to begin with. I haven't seen any indication that being addicting is bad in itself.

> I haven't seen any indication that being addicting is bad in itself.

Per se, unnecessary dependence is simply inconvenient. This is a big part of why I never got into drinking coffee: I'd see friends and family who (for some reason or another) wouldn't be able to get their morning coffee on a given day and how shitty they would feel that morning. I don't like the lack of flexibility inherent in having a dependency on anything. I've always been a big fan of getting enough sleep (even throughout high school and college), so I never had occasion to get hooked in the first place.

To be clear, it's very possible that they find the benefits of routine caffeine consumption to be entirely worth the downside of dependence (particularly given how ubiquitous access is on an average day). My comment, and my experience, just provides a motivation (albeit a fairly minor one) for avoiding dependence per se.