I remember being in a similar argument myself. I was talking with someone about how I had (long ago!) deliberately started smoking to see if quitting would be hard [1], and I found that, though there were periods where I'd had cravings, it wasn't hard to distract myself, and eventually they went away and I was able to easily quit.

The other person (who was not a smoker and so probably didn't take anything personally) said, "Well, sure, in that case it's easy to quit smoking, because you went in with the intent to prove it's easy to quit. Anyone would find it easy to stay away from cigarettes in that case!"

So I said, "Then shouldn't that be the anti-smoking tactic that schools use? Make all students take up smoking, just to prove they can quit. Then, everyone will grow up with the ability to quit smoking without much effort."

[1] and many, many people have told me this is insane, so no need to remind me