For alcohol, the default is social drinking which is why you don't have widespread alcoholism in most countries where people consume plenty of alcohol. For smoking the default is constant nicotine top up(the nicotine delivery is instant, lasts seconds to minutes and the withdrawal symptoms starts in an hour). Both harmful of course but the alcohol has much less harmful defaults.
“Alcoholism” is outdated and has been widely replaced by AUD (Alcohol Use Disorder).
I looked at Germany, according to Wikipedia the average consumption of pure ethanol per person per year in Germany as of 2019 was 12.2 liters. This was the 5th highest in the world, and equivalent to 686 standard 5% beers per year.
According to the WHO “moderate drinking” is 1 drink per day for women and 2 drinks per day for men, so the average German is already consuming above WHO guidelines.
It gets worse when you consider that about 1/4 of Germans don’t consume alcohol at all, and another 1/4 barely consume any, suggesting that the “average” isn’t really telling us much and the 70th, 80th, and 90th percentiles have very concerning consumption numbers. I assume most of those people consider themselves “social drinkers” but statistically they cannot be.
Average German lifespan is about 80 years. What if it was 70 years for an 80th percentile drinker and 90 years for a 20th percentile drinker, I assume that changes your conclusion? These are of course entirely made up numbers, and the data doesn't even exist as far as I'm aware, but goes to show how useless averages may be.
As for the other countries: 56% of French either "don't drink" or "only on special occasions", 43.5% of Spaniards never drink or less than 2x per week, and 35% of Italians do not drink compared to 12% who drink daily.
Like it or not the median data point in these population sets are those of people who drink very little.
