First of all, my personal experience is that smoking is not addictive. I smoked for about five years in high school and into college. I wasn’t a chaim smoker, and went thgough about a pack of cigarettes a week. I also smoked a pipe, which I much preferred. When I got seriously into singing and was told that smoking can ruin a voice, I stopped cold turkey, and never looked back. I suffered no pangs of withdrawal, never craved a cigarette and never looked back.
People are right to yeshivot must do more to curb smoking. I’ve heard of various yeshivot banning it outright, which is the correct thing to do. But doing so creates other problems. Kids are kids and they naturally gravitate towards mischief. Smoking has, for a long time, been the accepted yeshivish mischief. After all society frowns upon it, and smoking flouts that norm. But it isn’t dangerous in a ruchniout sense. Thus it was tolerated in yeshivot; as a “kosher” way to be bad. Remove smoking, and kids will replace it with something else. I think that is a big concern in yeshivot and why they don’t do more to ban smoking.