answer:Different drugs have different addictive qualities. Some, like pot smoking, are probably only habitual. Others, like coffee, involve annoying physical withdrawals. Still others, like alcohol or (way, way, way worse) crystal meth, can cause brutal and dangerous physical dependencies. Some people have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism and probably other drugs. This is common in North American aboriginal communities. There is also the personality dimension. Some people are prone to sensation-seeking. Some have supposedly “addictive” personalities. Whether these people are more prone to physical addiction or less prone to doing anything about it, I don’t know. (I actually rate high in that area myself, according to a recent psych test I took.) Amusingly, cigarette smoking is not an especially strong physical addiction. It’s almost all habitual. For that reason,cognitive-behavioral therapy has a pretty good track record of getting people to quit smoking. And keep in mind, how the government responds to a given drug is a pretty poor indication of how dangerous it is. Pot probably isn’t very dangerous at all. Alcohol is dangerous if abused, particularly for those who drive afterwards or have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism – yet, there’s a lot of evidence that it’s healthy if not abused. Cigarettes are pretty under-regulated, and are about guaranteed to shorten your life substantially if you don’t quit.