Unless I made a mistake somewhere, which is possible, all ghouls except the slow one should act the same. Eight seconds after entering a cave section, you will hear a growl. After 16 more seconds, you will hear a scream and fast ghoul will spawn. That section will now spawn a ghoul instantly when you enter it, doesn't matter how many times you kill the ghoul. This is tracked separately for individual cave maps. You can trigger ghoul on the first small room right after the rope and all other rooms will still take 24 seconds before the ghoul spawns. The timer also resets every time you leave the location, as long as the ghoul didn't spawn yet.
Only exception is the slow ghoul in the cave with the blood stone. This one will never run, but he will go after you the moment you enter.
I'm not really happy with the way ghouls work right now and I will be remaking them. They are suposed to start showing up depending on things you do in the main quest and other factors. I want them to be really dangerous enemies people want to avoid at all costs, since there will be harsh consequences if you keep angering them, even if you are strong enough to kill them. Right now though, they are a very good way to farm weapon XP, since they respawn every time you enter a room. You don't have to skip a week like with other enemies.
As for the addiction, I did some basic checks and I didn't encounter any negatives traveling through saves. Try to test that again and see if that really is a bug, or if you just forgot you saved after smoking.
There are two ways to get rid of addiction. Wait it out or use a special potion (I think I put it in the game, but I might be wrong). Every addictive item has certain point value. One point = one week. Beer has one point while vodka has like three. At the end of every week, your addiction points go down by one and you lose some mood. Once they reach zero, you stop losing mood.
Basicaly, drinking one beer will give you one week mood penalty. Drinking ten at once will give you ten weeks of mood penalty.
Generaly, drugs and alcohol are very good (for now) way to stay sane if you plan to spend a lot of time in the caves, dungeons or just killing humanoid enemies. You get large mood boost instantly, but larger mood penalty over time. This is not a problem if you keep drinking every week. It starts being a problem if you run out of alcohol or money, since you might be losing a lot of mood for quite a long time, depending on how much you drank before.