According to a U.S. national survey, the highest rate of dependence after any use is for tobacco: 32 percent of people who used nicotine even once went on to long-term habitual use. For alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine the rate is about 15 percent, and for heroin the rate is 23 percent.6 Taken together, American and Canadian population surveys indicate that merely having used cocaine a number of times is associated with an addiction risk of less than 10 percent.7 This doesn’t prove, of course, that nicotine is “more” addictive than, say, cocaine. We cannot know, since tobacco—unlike cocaine—is
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