“Quitting is easy. I’ve quit thousands of times.” - Mark Twain.
I believe he was referring to smoking, not nicotine.
There was a study published in Discover (or Discovery, forget which), which studied pilots and stewardesses, who smoked. They were chosen for this study because they have to undergo forced periods of abstinence from smoking, and because the period of abstinence was highly variable, ranging from just over an hour to over 24 hours.
The goal of the study was to establish a baseline for nicotine addiction, IIRC. But what they found in the study was the completely surprising to them, since it undercut the premise of the study that they were looking at a nicotine addiction.
The participants were required to observe times of cravings, and intensity, throughout the flight. The expectation was that the frequency and intensity of cravings would increase throughout the flight, as serum levels of nicotine dropped. In fact, they were so sure that the pattern would slope “upwards” they were just trying to establish the rate of increase.
What they found was that the pattern was completely at odds with what they expected. Cravings increased initially, and then dropped to a low, steady level for the duration of the flight. About a half hour before expected departure, all participants then had a rapidly increasing rate and severity of cravings. Here is the kicker: it didn’t matter how long the flight was. For long flights, the low, background level of craving occurred for many hours; on short, hour long flight, the low background level of craving occurred for only a few minutes.
This is simply incompatible with the idea that the addictiveness of cigarettes stems from an addiction to nicotine.
Additional, obviously less rigorous studies, showed the same things for prisoners. Prisoners would have roughly the same pattern: initial spike in cravings, dropping down to a low, background level, and then a rapid increase prior to pending release. This would occur whether dealing with an overnight “vacation”, or a sentence exceeding 10 years (when all but the nicotine derived from eating salads would have long since left the system — I assume they get vegetables in prison). The people conducting the studies just couldn’t understand how people could go for decades, in some cases, with little in the way of strong cravings from nicotine (those who had access to tobacco during incarceration were excluded from the study), only to be hell-bent on getting a cigarette decades after “quitting nicotine”.
You are operating from a flawed premise. The addiction to smoking is not derived from a simple addiction to nicotine. There is just no justification to believe that it is, and plenty of reasons to believe that the paradigm is completely wrong.