CVS will phase out tobacco sales by 1 Oct 2014

[Pete from Boston]

Nicotine and alcohol are addicting. Marijuana is said not to be addicting, but it's definitely habit-forming.

People can become addicted to anything, it's not a phenomenon limited to drugs. I'm sure some of us are addicted to clinching roads. But there is a difference between mental addiction (where the desire is all in your head) and chemical addiction (where your body develops a physical need for the substance and thus it's difficult to quit even if you really want to). THC, like ethyl alcohol, has no chemical addiction associated with it: you can drink or smoke weed as frequently or infrequently as you like, and if you decide to stop you can stop with no ill effects. Nicotine, meanwhile, causes a very strong chemical addiction. If you smoke tobacco, you have to smoke it regularly or you will start suffering from withdrawal symptoms. Try and take a day off from smoking and you'll get sick.

Point being, it's very difficult to use tobacco and not be addicted to it, since the very nature of it causes addiction. However, the vast majority of people who drink alcohol or smoke marijuana are not addicted, since you only become an addict if you abuse it to the point where it's a mental crutch for you.

This is an interesting discussion because the degree of use at which eyebrows are raised tends to differ between marijuana and alcohol due as much to societal norms as actual harm done to the individual.

Someone who drinks a lot, for example, just drinks a lot -- until they're an alcoholic, that is, because short of being a full-on alcoholic you're still within some bounds of "normal."  People who smoke a lot of pot, on the other hand, are probably less likely to get as much leeway, even though alcohol probably has few real rivals in the breadth of its social destructiveness.