On his book The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business
Cover Interview of December 04, 2019
Lastly
Drafts of The Age of Addiction provoked two different
sorts of criticisms. Either I had been too quick to accept the idea of novel
addictions, or I had underrated the hydra-headed menace of limbic capitalism
and failed to show how to counter it. The book, historian Bill McAllister told
me, was really about who controls our brains. Naming the system was not enough.
The second charge troubled me more than the first. Behavioral
addictions are obviously subject to hype, and not every form of consumer excess
is an addiction. In fact, one way to describe proliferating addictions is simply
as the most harmful endpoints on different spectrums of excessive consumption.
Yet the harms are real, often lethal, and bear the stamp of
corporate design and business rationalization. What could be done about the
McDonaldization of old and new vices?
A lot, it turns out. We have options like education,
taxation, age restrictions, prescription-only sales, advertising bans, spatial
segregation (smokers freezing outdoors), digitally decluttered environments
(favored by wary elites), lawsuits, international treaties to control supply
and marketing, manufacturing quotas, and state monopolies designed to limit
supply and intoxication. Blanket prohibitions have not worked well, as
organized crime typically steps in when licit commerce is outlawed. But
combinations of the other policies have produced some public health victories,
such as the recent leveling off and decline of global per capita cigarette
consumption. Limbic capitalists don’t win them all.
Limbic capitalists are likewise vulnerable to ridicule. BUGA
UP, Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions, was founded
by Australian anti-smoking activists in 1978. The acronym punned on Aussie
slang for screwing something up. What the activists screwed up was billboards,
which they altered with spray paint. Overnight “Have a Winfield”—a popular
Australian cigarette brand—became “Have a Wank.”
Cheeky populism worked. In 1992 the Australian government
outlawed all tobacco ads save for those at point of sale. It was a victory for
activists like Arthur Chesterfield-Evans, a spray-can-wielding surgeon who gave
a defiant speech to a crowd gathered around a Sydney billboard. “After six
years of surgery,” he said, “I could accept that people suffer and die. But I
had real trouble coming to terms with the fact that cigarette diseases were the
result of a cold-blooded and systematic campaign of deception waged by monied
interests against less informed consumers.”
Then the doctor climbed a ladder, rattled his can, and
spray-painted “Legal drug pushers the real criminals.” The cheering,
placard-waving crowd joined in, covering the ad from top to bottom with mocking
graffiti. The police, who were looking on, did nothing to stop them.
All of this happened back in 1983. More than a generation
later we still live in a world in which monied interests wage cold-blooded and
systematic campaigns of deception against less informed consumers, above all those
with low levels of education and social status.
The question I leave for readers is this: Do we, like Dr. Chesterfield-Evans,
have the moral courage and political wit to do something about it?
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
Lastly
Drafts of The Age of Addiction provoked two different sorts of criticisms. Either I had been too quick to accept the idea of novel addictions, or I had underrated the hydra-headed menace of limbic capitalism and failed to show how to counter it. The book, historian Bill McAllister told me, was really about who controls our brains. Naming the system was not enough.
The second charge troubled me more than the first. Behavioral addictions are obviously subject to hype, and not every form of consumer excess is an addiction. In fact, one way to describe proliferating addictions is simply as the most harmful endpoints on different spectrums of excessive consumption.
Yet the harms are real, often lethal, and bear the stamp of corporate design and business rationalization. What could be done about the McDonaldization of old and new vices?
A lot, it turns out. We have options like education, taxation, age restrictions, prescription-only sales, advertising bans, spatial segregation (smokers freezing outdoors), digitally decluttered environments (favored by wary elites), lawsuits, international treaties to control supply and marketing, manufacturing quotas, and state monopolies designed to limit supply and intoxication. Blanket prohibitions have not worked well, as organized crime typically steps in when licit commerce is outlawed. But combinations of the other policies have produced some public health victories, such as the recent leveling off and decline of global per capita cigarette consumption. Limbic capitalists don’t win them all.
Limbic capitalists are likewise vulnerable to ridicule. BUGA UP, Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions, was founded by Australian anti-smoking activists in 1978. The acronym punned on Aussie slang for screwing something up. What the activists screwed up was billboards, which they altered with spray paint. Overnight “Have a Winfield”—a popular Australian cigarette brand—became “Have a Wank.”
Cheeky populism worked. In 1992 the Australian government outlawed all tobacco ads save for those at point of sale. It was a victory for activists like Arthur Chesterfield-Evans, a spray-can-wielding surgeon who gave a defiant speech to a crowd gathered around a Sydney billboard. “After six years of surgery,” he said, “I could accept that people suffer and die. But I had real trouble coming to terms with the fact that cigarette diseases were the result of a cold-blooded and systematic campaign of deception waged by monied interests against less informed consumers.”
Then the doctor climbed a ladder, rattled his can, and spray-painted “Legal drug pushers the real criminals.” The cheering, placard-waving crowd joined in, covering the ad from top to bottom with mocking graffiti. The police, who were looking on, did nothing to stop them.
All of this happened back in 1983. More than a generation later we still live in a world in which monied interests wage cold-blooded and systematic campaigns of deception against less informed consumers, above all those with low levels of education and social status.
The question I leave for readers is this: Do we, like Dr. Chesterfield-Evans, have the moral courage and political wit to do something about it?