Yes, Nicotine is a drug.
If you smoke, yes, you're addicted.
How can you stop? It's quite simple, as long as you understand the principles behind it.
While this may seem offensive at first, you could compare nicotine to heroin quite easily.
The use of either doesn't provide true enjoyment so much as stem the feelings of withdrawal.
Also similar is the way in which it takes a higher dosage, over time, to stop those withdrawal feelings.
This is why, over time, heroin addicts and smokers both increase their consumption.
Even worse is the fact that smoking kills many, many more people than heroin does.
Heroin also comes with nasty physical withdrawal, and a whole slew of stuff that, frankly, isn't anything like nicotine.
Chief among the ways in which the two differ is the severity of physical withdrawal.
With nicotine, you barely feel it.
In its pure physical form, it's little more than a small feeling in your stomach, just like being hungry.
However, because you've associated that with smoking cigarettes, you believe that it's a massive need for tobacco.
Just like the harder drug, when you smoke, you're setting yourself up to need the next one.
As substance levels in your blood subside, you feel more and more urge to get your fix again.
Once you understand this, though, quitting cigarettes becomes a lot easier.
When you fully understand the ways that nicotine works within your system, quitting actually becomes quite easy.
Trying to quit without that knowledge, however, is the reason why so many people claim that quitting is so hard.