I think you're ignoring caffeine and tobacco, for whatever reason, on the "physically addicting" line of thought.
I have a broader concept of what is physically addictive than the medical community. So, I might include caffeine and tobacco in there or I might not. I'm addicted to caffeine through coffee and have the normal withdrawal symptom (headache) if I don't drink some small amount of coffee
every morning. But I'm not sure caffeine or tobacco are physically addictive (the latter I hazard a guess more likely is). I don't smoke cigarettes for one, although, I on rare occasions will smoke a cigar.
The
problem with terms like
physical addiction and
psychological addiction are that you have to establish a definition and
criteria for each to give the terms any teeth.
If I were to take off "my hat" so-to-speak of religion and put on my hat where I attempt to think in a purely "scientific" and "analytical" way then I can not there are certain characteristics exhibited in alcoholics, heroin addicts, cocaine addicts that are not seen in say... people addicted to coffee.
That principally being the craving issue in which one is observed in the ability to stop once they take "one." Something outside themselves must stop them.
For me, this is the real indicator of
physical addiction, and I hypothesize that it is
biologically set in. Like diabetes. For me this is the
disease nature of physical addiction.
What I'm suggesting is that in psychological addictions--like drinking coffee, or even social or emotional reliance on drinking to heavy in social events--
behaviors can be modified in relation to the substance consumed
without giving up the substance.
With
physical addictions, save a cure or some pharmacological medication that can be taken to reactivate control in the nervous system of the person,
total abstinence from the substance one is *physically* addicted to must be maintained.
Analysis | Define Analysis at Dictionary.com
2. this process as a method of studying the nature of something or of determining its essential features and their relations:
the grammatical analysis of a sentence.
But the medical community seems to regard the main criteria, so far as I can tell, of
physical addiction being
the potential to die from withdrawal. Currently, that potential only exists in the substance known as alcohol, and not with a little irony the only substance legal (between alcohol, crack cocaine, heroin, and meth).
You are not going to die going through crack cocaine, heroin, meth, caffeine, or tobacco withdrawal.
People often yap about how tobacco is "harder" to quiet than say heroin or alcohol (for an alcoholic). But they never stop to consider smoking cigarettes is like dancing in a gay parade and being a guy going out to a bar and screwing a woman you jut met on the first night. By that I mean they don't
crash your world. Crack cocaine, heroin, and alcoholism do. Devastate family relations, job lose, you can end up homeless. You don't end up homeless because you like to drink coffee to much, are over weight and hooked on junk food, or even hooked on cigarettes. So, great suffering motivates to stop.
Albeit, a single $10 rock of crack cocaine should cost less than a *single* cigarette (if it were made legal). So, if cigarettes were made illegal and droughts set in (just as the price of diamonds sky rocket by being made artificially rare on the market) because shipments had to be smuggled and criminal organizations raised prices radically, a single cigarette might cost an American cigarette addict $5 or $10 dollars. Then some of them might end up homeless. How so? You are a crack cocaine or cigarette addict earning $320 before taxes a week for $8 an hour. Your addiction is such that you can smoke up on a single Friday evening in 5 hours $200 by yourself. For crack if bought in "dime" bags ($10 bags) that is 20 rocks. Or for a cigarette addict 20 cigarettes. But imagine if cocaine were
legal and could be bought at certain stores, or bought even as cooked up crack. Then I hypothesize what costs $10 now in crack would plummet to between $0.50 to $1.00.
So, if it costs $1 a bag then the crack addict smoking on Friday, that earned $320 before taxes, spend only $20 or if he keeps going until his body feels sick from doing so much, he bought 60 altogether for a sum of $60. In other words he pays bills, or pays them more frequently, he's not homeless. Even the cost on society is reduced.