HLTHAGE 2L03 Weeks 6-11

Week 6

Lassiter - Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs

Plano and its “Heroin Epidemic”

Late 1990s: Plano’s Heroin Deaths

  • Late 1990s: 14+ white high school and college students died of heroin ODs in Plano

  • Plano = Wealthy suburb in Dallas, “safest midsized city in America”

  • Intense national coverage of the Plano heroin deaths

Media Coverage and Public Reaction

  • Local news: “Heroin epidemic sweeping Plano and the nation”

  • National news: Innocent white children from idyllic suburbs are being corrupted by sinister outside forces

  • Both local and national news painted the drug users (white teens) as tragic victims

  • “Clean-cut teenagers”, had “bright futures ahead of them”

  • There was a moral panic of “Heroin in suburbia” - a usually inner city drug is being used in white affluent suburbs

  • ABC World News exposé: "new enemy that has invaded their city and is threatening their children… people thought it couldn’t happen here, but it did”

  • CNN: “Is your town ripe for picking by drug dealers?”

Racial Blame and Law Enforcement Response

  • Illegal immigrants and POC were to blame, and were seen as evil outside forces

  • Plano police: Blamed illegal immigrants who “peddle Chiva (AKA heroin) to rich suburban kids”

  • U.S. District attorney: Zero tolerance for “Mexican cartels preying on this community”

  • DEA: Announced a major operation in Plano, indicting 29 “drug pushers” charged with conspiracy to commit murder. The 13 who were Mexican were called “calculated and cold-blooded” kingpins who received 20 years to life in prison

  • The 16 who were white teens agreed to a plea bargain and got probation or short jail stints

Criminalization and Legislative Frameworks of the WoD

Framework and Racialization

  • Framework of the WoD since the 1950s: The suburban crisis

  • Innocent victims: White middle-class youth

  • Must be protected by illegal drug markets and criminal drug laws

  • White middle-class youth shouldn’t be exposed to drugs nor the criminal justice system

  • WoD and its associated laws is a form of social control of urban minority populations

  • Urban minority populations are seen as the “outside sinister force”

  • Drug pushers, kingpins are all connotated with POC and immigrants from urban areas

  • WoD is an extension of the WoC (war on crime) - which is the foundation for the “new Jim Crow”

The New Jim Crow

  • Jim Crow = System of racial segregation and disenfranchisement in the South and border states during the late 1800s - mid 1960s

  • State and local laws that mandated segregation (washrooms, schools, transportation, restaurants)

  • African Americans were banned from voting (disenfranchisement)

  • “Jim Crow” (namesake) = caricature of a foolish and subservient Black person from a popular minstrel show

  • New Jim Crow = A modern era of less overt racial segregation through mass incarceration and the WoD

  • Works to segregate by maintaining a large number of poor POC to a permanent underclass

  • Mirrors old Jim Crow: Rights such as voting, housing and employment are taken away as consequences of felony convictions

  • New Jim Crow (WoD + WoC) works on criminalizing blackness (+ immigration) and decriminalizing whiteness @ the same time

Consequences and Racial Disparities

  • Use and distribution of drugs by minorities is heavily criminalized and monitored

  • Use and distribution of drugs by whites are seen as social practices or rooted in public health issues

  • POC and immigrants are disproportionately represented in incarceration, as the WoD and WoC frameworks protect white individuals from affluent regions

  • By 2000, African Americans and Latinos represented ¾ of all drug offenders, even though whites were a large majority of drug users and dealers

  • Urban and suburban teens sell and consume drugs @ almost identical rates of POC, but inner city black residents are the most arrested and incarcerated for marijuana (most popular drug of affluent white youth)

  • The exemptions made for white youth in the underground drug market place protects them from the carceral state - which maintains the ideal goal of the U.S. becoming an ideal nation of white suburbia

Racialized Protection of White Youth

  • White teens are:

    • The most sympathetic victims

    • The illegitimate targets of law enforcement crackdowns

    • The chief beneficiaries of public health prevention campaigns

  • The goal of the WoD protecting white suburbia and killing urban minority populations is shared by all political parties

  • Every important policy shift in the WoD have been supported by legislative majorities (both republican and democratic)

  • Democratic leaders in Congress worked with the GOP (Grand Old Party - AKA Republicans) in making mandatory minimum sentences

  • Were passed almost unanimously in 1956, 1970, and 1986

History of the Suburban Imperatives on the WoD - Protecting White Youth

Cyclical Moral Panics

  • Suburban political culture has made cyclical “epidemics” of pot smoking by white middle class youth

  • Marijuana use has always come in and out of moral panic, and is almost always seen as a gateway drug to other, more “dangerous” ones

  • Cyclical epidemics of pot smoking have been fueled by parents’ movements @ 3 stages in the 1950s and 1980s

1950s: Marijuana-to-Heroin Narrative

  • 1950s: Mass suburbanization made people anxious about the delinquency of affluent teens, political culture sensationalized a marijuana-to-heroin narrative

  • Middle-class grassroots groups demanded severe penalties to prevent “pushers” from corrupting white youth

1960s–1970s: Generational Rebellion and Policy Loosening

  • Late 1960s - 1970s: Illegal drug use (acid craze) increasing in college campuses and suburbs were no longer being blamed on POC “pushers” but rather generational revolt, so now the laws from before began targeting white youth

  • The severe penalties were then loosened so that white youth (who were “otherwise law-abiding”) wouldn’t face jail

1980s: The “Just Say No” Era

  • Late 1970s - 1980s: “Just Say No” campaign was institutionalizes as the National Federation of Parents for Drug Free Youth (AKA NFP) brought back the distress of pot smoking by youth

  • Concerns linked to the breakdown of middle-class families and the emergence of latchkey children (kids that would go home to an empty house)

  • Brought back the “pusher” trope and the marijuana-as-a-gateway mystique

Policy and Media Approaches

  • Carter and Reagan administrations brought zero-tolerance policies

  • “Just Say No” campaign had 2 distinct approaches:

    • For white middle-class areas: Public health campaigns

      • Network television included programs to teach middle-class parents on the dangers of pot smoking (e.g. “Crisis in Suburbia: The Hooked Generation”)

    • For urban minority areas: Militarized interdiction

      • Nixon announced an “all out offensive against public enemy number 1”

  • Characteristic shared by all 3 stages of “epidemics”: Changing laws and public health campaigns to protect the “impossible criminal”, which are affluent white youth, and to incarcerate urban minorities

History of the Suburban Imperatives on the WoD - Criminalizing Urban Minorities

1950s Mandatory Minimums and Racialized Narratives

  • 1950s: Mandatory minimum laws were enacted, influenced by the narratives of racialized pushers and white middle-class victims

  • 1951: Boggs Act included harsh mandatory minimums for distribution and possession of weed and heroin

  • Politicians and law enforcement officials often perpetuated these racialized narratives

  • 1951: Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and Senate investigators collaborated to connect Black and Puerto Rican “dope pushers” with “pretty blonde” girls seduced into junkie prostitution

  • Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime said “no penalty is too severe” for “the peddler (drug dealer) who is willing to wreck young lives”

1956 and Beyond: The Sinister Pusher Stereotype

  • 1956: FBN and Senate again allied to create racial classifications of:

    • The sinister urban pusher: Mexican, Black, and Italian American traffickers

    • The sympathetic victims: White prostitutes and suburban addicts

  • Narcotics Control Act doubled the mandatory minimums + established a man of life in prison/death penalty for providing narcotics to a minor

California Example

  • California’s war on narcotics in the 50s also showed the power of the pusher-victim and marijuana-to-heroin narratives

  • Postwar LA: Media and law enforcement blamed Mexicans for the narcotics trade

  • Sensationalized the trope of Mexican American “juvenile gangsters” invading white suburbs

  • Many grassroots organizations demanded harsh penalties that protected white youth and incarcerated Mexicans

  • Neighbourhood groups and middle-class networks: Wanted life without parole or the death penalty for drug crimes

  • Result: Increased mandatory minimum sentences for heroin and weed distribution in 1953, but with a discretionary probation loophole for 1st time possession

  • This loophole was aimed for youth “from a good environment” arrested for weed

The Shift to Medicalizing Addiction

Liberal Shift and White Victimhood

  • The liberal shift to medicalizing heroin addiction started in the mid 1960s

  • Medicalization was fueled by the continued framing of “victims” of the narcotic crisis - runaway white daughters and hopeless suburban junkies

  • Life magazine (1965): Published “Karen and John: Two Lives Lost to Heroin” after searching NYC’s Needle Park for charismatic white junkies

Legislation and Impact

  • Though addiction was medicalized, distribution and possession by POC were still heavily criminalized

  • This time, white suburban individuals were seen as “sick”

  • President Lyndon B. Johnson got Congress to change mandatory minimums to allow civil commitment for “narcotic and marijuana users likely to respond to treatment”

  • Goal was to prevent white users from going to jail by instead putting them in rehab

  • Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act of 1966: Allowed judges to sentence hospitalization for those arrested for possession, while still maintaining full sanctions to “those ruthless men who sell despair” (POC arrested for distribution)

LSD, White Youth, and Enforcement

  • Policies changed again during the acid craze

  • Media and law enforcement weren’t able to place the blame onto urban minorities, as it was white college students almost exclusively distributing and consuming LSD

  • Timothy Leary (white psychologist and author) was the one touring campuses and pushing the benefits of LSD

  • Because of the lack of racialized blame, there wasn’t a call for more punitive law enforcement

  • 1966: Johnson administration officials didn’t want to criminalize LSD use and distribution because they thought it would fill up jails with college students

  • 1967 “Summer of Love”: Showed runaway suburban hippies in urban slums and teen girls hospitalized for LSD induced psychosis or for sexual violence

  • Even though these narratives were pushed and led to tougher punishment, max terms for distribution was only 5 years, and possession could only be sentenced as a misdemeanor (since peddlers were still very much white)

The Unwillingness to Incarcerate and Punish White Pot Users

Policy Reform and Advocacy

  • As more and more white middle-class people were facing drug law enforcement, groups were pushing for policy reform

  • Now the white people have the risk of facing the punishments made for POC

  • 1968: American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) launched a campaign to legalize marijuana for adults and to restrict access for minors

  • Campaign was pitched to middle-class Americans

  • ACLU did not address the injustices of marijuana prohibition before, because marijuana use didn’t yet spread to white middle-class society

  • National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (AKA NORML) was made up of middle-class college students and professionals

  • Pot Luck: Their 1st PR campaign featuring a white teen girl locked in a cell with an untouched plate of prison food on her lap

  • 1969 CBS TV special: Questioned if incarceration is still appropriate for “laws broken so often by law-abiding people”

Legal Adjustments

  • 1969: American political system reduced penalties for weed possession while increasing minimums for dope pushers

  • Marijuana decriminalization movement of the 1970s was based on the view that white middle-class Americans shouldn’t have their futures ruined by policies designed to protect them

  • 1972: National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse advocated for no legal sanctions for personal use or casual sale, while still having penalties against for profit distribution

  • 11 states decriminalized simple marijuana possession, while the rest had the federal misdemeanor model

  • States also had discretionary penalties for weed dealers and added the “possession with intent to distribute”

  • This category further separated the recreational white middle-class subculture from a criminalized urban market

The Crack Epidemic

Crack Panic and Racialization

  • Mid to late 1980s: Crack epidemic

  • The anxieties of the crack epidemic were still based in the binary of white suburban addict-victims and minority ghetto predator-criminals

  • 1986: Anti-Drug Abuse Act was created by President Reagan, as well as Joe Biden and Charles Rangel

  • Included the 100-1 crack to powder cocaine sentences (500 g of cocaine triggering the same penalty as 5 g of crack)

  • The Anti-Abuse Drug Act targeted urban minorities while protecting white kids

  • 2006: the ACLU found that African Americans represented > 80% of crack cocaine defendants even though whites were 66% of the market

Media and Public Response

  • Ronald and Nancy Reagan still lumped recreational pot smoking with heroin and crack use as the epidemic “killing our children”

  • Still urged teens to fight pushers by joining Just Say No Clubs

  • Media: White middle class youth were the most sympathetic victims of cocaine and crack traffickers

  • 1986: Newsweek published an expose “Kids and Cocaine: An Epidemic Strikes Middle America” featuring a 14 year old cheerleader rescued from an inner city crack house

  • 1989: Crack USA, an HBO documentary, portrayed Palm Beach County Florida as a once-utopian suburb infiltrated by the “crime and violence of the big cities”

  • 1988: Time’s “Kids Who Sell Crack” cover story included an incarcerated and remorseless teen gangster-dealer from an East LA barrio, perpetuating the “juvenile Mexican gangster” trope

Lecture 5 - WoD in North America

Contextualizing the War on Drugs

  • Prohibition didn’t start overnight

    • Grew gradually from early 20th century efforts focused on health and morality (think temperance movement)

  • Substances (alcohol, cocaine, and heroin) were consumer goods —> stigmatized drugs and legally restricted

  • Mid 20th century: Politicians and public linked drugs to criminality and violence

  • Domestic pressures in the U.S. (+ social unrest in the 1960s i.e. Vietnam war, civil rights movement) pushed government to “clamp down” harder on drug use and drug users

Drugs and the Antiwar Movement - LSD

  • LSD used to be considered a medical miracle

    • Safe, non-toxic, non-addictive

  • Psychedelic movement embraced drugs like LSD

    • Represented a breaking free from traditional societal conditioning

    • Allowed people to imagine a better world

  • Timothy Leary = Prominent psychologist that was passionate about LSD

    • Called the “High Priest of LSD” and “the most dangerous man in America”

  • Counterculture wanted to preserve the medical use of LSD

  • Conservatives alarmed by youth rebellion and changing norms pushed for bans 

Nixon’s Declaration of the War on Drugs (WoD)

  • 1971: Nixon officially declared the “War on Drugs”

  • Nixon’s WoD wasn’t just about drugs, it targeted groups he saw as “enemies”: antiwar protesters and Black American

    • Knowingly exaggerated the danger of drugs and certain groups to further their goals

  • John Ehrlichman = Nixon’s advisor

    • Admitted their strategy implicitly targeted Black people and hippies

    • “We couldn’t make it illegal to be against the war or black, but by associating hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities”

  • Tools used in WoD:

    • Arresting community leaders

    • Raiding homes

    • Vilifying groups in media (e.g. Urban minority drug pushers)

Scientific Approaches: NIDA and Policy

  • Initially, WoD emphasized treatment (rehab for white drug users) and prevention (public health campaigns in white affluent areas, crackdowns in urban minority areas)

  • 1974: National Institute on Drug Abuse (AKA NIDA) was established to lead federal drug research

    • Adopted “exposure theory” (regular physical exposure to a substance will inevitably create an addiction)

  • Critique of NIDA: They fund research selectively

    • Neglects studies on medicinal potential of drugs or harm prevention

    • Research is mainly focused on abstinence

The Cultural War on Drugs

  • The WoD shaped how society views drugs and drug users

  • Cultural messages from the WoD:

    • Drug use = addiction

    • Drug users (of colour) were evil, abusive and deviant

    • Drug users (white) were “undeserving” (i.e. crack babies, crack mothers, well-to-do white teens being preyed upon by drug pushers

  • The cultural messages of the WoD had 3 results:

    • Increasing stigma

    • Obstructed funding for alternative interventions (other than law enforcement and public health campaigns)

    • Built public support for tough-on-crime policies

Criminalization and Electoral Politics

  • The cultural campaign for the WoD gained bipartisan support (see Impossible Criminals for examples)

  • Criminalization became the backbone of policy, with presidents building on their predecessors

    • Nixon: increased federal powers and penalties

    • Reagan: harsh mandatory minimums and the 100-to-1 crack-cocaine sentencing disparity

    • Clinton: expanded police forces, built more prisons, adopted “truth in sentencing laws” (offenders need to serve @ least 85% of their sentence to be eligible for release)

Mass Incarceration and the Prison-Industrial Complex

  • Reagan’s 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse act —> a huge rise in incarceration

    • 1980: 24,000 people were incarcerated for drug offenses

    • 2009: 350,000 incarcerated for drug offenses, 1.4 million on parole for them

    • From 1980 - 2022:

      • Anti-drug spending grew 1,100%

      • Drug incarcerations increased 10x

  • Courts became overwhelmed with drug cases

  • WoD developed and expanded the prison industrial complex

    • Millions depended on the carceral system for employment (prison guards, cooks + prison labor feeding into the economy)

Race, Inequality, and the WoD

  • The impacts of the WoD fall disproportionately on Black and other minority communities

    • Immigrants, Latinos, sometimes Italians

  • Cultural and policy expansions for drug use are racially structured:

    • Black drug use was seen as a moral failure (bad choices, bad character)

    • White drug use was seen through the lens of illness, poverty, rebellion, and influence from urban and foreign individuals (e.g. Rust Belt - Appalachia, return of prominent meth use is often blamed on economic collapse and job losses)

  • Racial disparities in arrest and sentencing produce broader social consequences (i.e. the New Jim Crow - See Impossible Criminals for examples)

    • > 8% of Black Americans are disenfranchised (lost right to vote) due to drug offenses (some states as high as 20%)

    • Loss of voting rights have tipped the balance in key elections

    • Unemployment, community disruption, and family breakdown become cyclical effects

Additional Social Impacts

  • WoD establishes and locks down poverty (another component of the New Jim Crow)

    • Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act (from the Clinton era) = Allowed permanent bans from food stamps and public housing for people with drug offenses

      • 180,000 single mothers lost benefits

    • New laws made it easier to remove children from homes wehre drug crimes occurred

  • WoD has health consequences:

    • Restricted access to healthcare increases risk for issues such as HIV/AIDS (can be transmitted through the sharing of needles)

    • Unregulated drug market leads to contaminated supplies

  • Impact on violence:

    • Both the drug trade and its policing have increased community violence

  • Impact on civil rights:

    • Surveillance, disenfranchisement, “carding”, civil forfeiture (seizing property believed to be linked to illegal activities) have expanded

Organized Crime and Drug Use

  • The WoD has not reduced drug use, supply, dependence, or death rates

  • Instead, the WoD has grown organized crime

  • Consensus among scholars is that the WoD strategies have failed to achieve their stated goals

Why does the WoD Persist if it isn’t Effective in Tackling Drugs?

  • Bias is hidden and implicitly enforced by drug policy, allowing people in power to fulfill their goals in discrimination

    • See Nixon’s advisor’s comment

  • The WoD is effective as a method of racialized social control (New Jim Crow)

    • Keeps urban minorities in poverty

    • Exempts affluent white people from incarceration, allowing them to continue the drug trade that in part fuels the economy

  • WoD is heavily ideological - seen as a “holy war” and a crusade to eliminate evil

  • Drug policies win votes due to bipartisan consensus

  • Drug policies and incarceration feed the prison economy

Key Takeaways and the Current Landscape

  • The WoD is a multidimensional campaign:

    • Technical (by selectively supporting science and research)

    • Legislative (through lawmaking and building upon current laws)

    • Policing

    • Carceral (prison system)

    • Cultural image (politicians and the media creating public images and framing certain populations)

    • Diplomatic (through international policy)

  • Farber (historian) sees the WoD as the 2nd American civil war

  • Not all drugs or addictions are targeted equally

    • Policies reflect political priorities and discrimination

  • The WoD continues despite cannabis legalization in Canada and some U.S. states

    • Think heroin, crack, meth

  • Governments (including Canada in 2018) show continued support and endorsement 

    • Despite cracks appearing in public support and policy

Week 8

Koram, “Phantasmal commodities: law, violence, and the juris-diction of drugs”

Introduction

  • The use of the term “drugs” emerged globally in the 20th century

    • Term is a catch-all descriptor of psychoactives that have metaphysical characteristics

    • Substances that are “drugs” don’t really share things in common, and they extend beyond chemicals or plants

    • Drugs are seen to carry the potential to physically harm those who ingest it, as well as the potential to capture the very spiritual essence of the individual

    • E.g. James Q. Wilson (former chairman of USA Advisory Commission on Drug Abuse Prevention) - “Tobacco shortens one’s life, cocaine debases it. Nicotine alters one’s habits, cocaine alters one’s soul.”

  • Michael Taussig (anthropologist) calls drugs “phantasmal commodities”

    • Phantasmal commodities = Commodities viewed more than just substances, but rather psychoactives that carry myths, fears, and symbolic power in the law, media, and popular culture

    • “Drugs are a magical commodity that actively embodies and mediates hidden forces of violence and desire”

The Legal Creation of “Drugs” and the Invention of the Drug Problem

  • The boundaries between what counts as a drug and what doesn’t are established by law, society, and politics, not pharmacology

    • This is what makes drugs a “legal fiction” (something that doesn’t really exist outside of the law making process)

    • The law creates and legislates what we categorize as drugs

    • In reality, outside of the law making process, there isn’t anything solid that determines what is a drug and what isn’t a drug (there are many psychoactives that aren’t considered drugs like sugar and coffee)

  • Jacques Derrida (philosopher) - “There are no drugs in nature; only substances regarded as drugs by a society acting in accordance with its own priorities”

    • Western societies change the meaning of drugs to serve political, social, and moral purposes

    • Alcohol and tobacco are not legally considered drugs, whereas cannabis and cocaine are - even though they’re all psychoactive

    • Fuels the alcohol and tobacco industries which greatly benefit the economy

    • Law often defines cocaine as a narcotic although it is biochemically considered a stimulant

      • Creates greater sense of danger regarding the drug, supporting policies to criminalize it

  • Classifying something as a drug means it is dangerous, but not just dangerous on someone’s health

    • Can represent something out of order, risky, corrupting to social values - which is dangerous for people in power that maintain social order

  • Jean Baudrillard (philosopher) - argues that drugs are categorized as so partially because they are threats to Western societie’s fundamental cultural values of self-control, productivity, and rationality

    • Drugs represent a loss of rationality, and immediate satisfaction and desire over delayed gratification

    • Drugs are a bigger evil in Western societies because they are proof that reason and will could be defeated by appetite

  • David Herzberg (historian) - “the drug category is produced legally and socially - its boundaries shift with priorities of race, class, and morality”

    • Relates to the Impossible Criminals paper, e.g. The initial reluctance to consider LSD a narcotic as it was mostly used by white college students, so prohibiting it would’ve lead to many affluent white youth in jail

    • Drug culture has always been associate with “the other of the Occident” - think Ah Sin paper and opium smoking in China, ayahuasca and coca use in Latin America, etc. 

    • This is why drugs are often feared, because they’re connected to threats of the colonial other

Drugs, Law, and the Social Order

  • Prohibition laws do more than just ban drugs

    • Shapes who belong to the “good” part of society

    • Identifies populations that are pushed out and feared

    • Drug prohibition is “anchored in law-making violence”

  • Making things illegal = Green light to punish, exclude, and use violence against people who use, sell, or are associated with the substances

    • E.g. Legally allowing police raids without warrants, mandatory minimum sentences

  • This adds to a second characteristic of drugs as “phantasmal commodities”

    • “Phantasmal commodities” are treated like monsters (scary, threatening, contagious)

  • Policies against these drugs have the goal of keeping the social world clean and safe from threats

Drugs as “Transgressive Substances”

  • Phantasmal commodities v.s. regular commodities

    • Regular commodities: Created by man through labour and capital, then they are exploited for commercial gain - man controls commodity

    • Phantasmal commodities: Created by man through labour and capital, exploited for commercial gain, and also takes over individuals - man controls commodity and commodity rules their creators

  • Drugs and capitalism both encourage the idea that you can always want and consume more

    • Just an extreme example of the “never enough” mindset central to how capitalism works

  • Even though drugs are the most associated with addiction, there are many other markets that feed into this (gaming, gambling, shopping, eating)

  • Commodity fetishism (idea from Marx) = The way we attribute social relationships and power to object themselves, rather than recognizing theme as products of human labor and social relations

    • Treating commodities as if they have their own social life

    • Treating commodities like totems, which then transform the human upon connection

    • Taussig: Builds onto commodity fetishism theory by theorizing ‘transgressive substances’

    • Christianized fetishizations in which sacred objects stand in for God/the Devil and good/evil + capitalist fetish that commodities have their own inherent source of value

  • Transgressive substances = Substances that become totems for the disruption of the order of human life. They question the notion of “demand” due to the intense desire and satisfaction from consuming them

    • Connected to the “these commodities rule their creators” notion

    • Rather than standing in for God or the devil, transgressive substances are totems for atypical social order and non human existence

    • The transgression drugs allow us to take is from the specter of human (rationality, social order, delayed gratification, discipline, productivity) —> the spectre of non human (physics and chemistry, sex and silence, dreams and nightmares, questioning the values of social order)

    • The fact that drugs are transgressive substances helps justify the law’s purifying violence

    • Fears of how drugs might lead to the breakdown of how society works 

Living within the limpieza

  • Taussig’s work on drugs and law enacted violence is heavily informed by the Cali region of Colombia in 2001

    • Country’s most intense period of counter-narcotics policing

    • Plan Colombia = USA-funded counter-narcotics program signed in 2000

    • Majority of the money went to law enforcement, policing, and military equipment

    • Plan Colombia escalated the violence of drug prohibition in Cali to unprecedented levels

    • “New technologies of violence, terror and ecocide were unleashed in the attempt to finally expel the demonic plant life from its midst”

  • Taussig argues that Plan Colombia did not lower violence related to drugs, but rather erupted it

    • Crop eradications - violence towards the ecosystem

    • Eradicated the very appearance of certain forms of nature from the environment

    • E.g. Spraying herbicides that poison the forest, rivers, and peasant crops (family agriculture)

    • Militarized attacks on rebels - abuses of human rights

    • Communities were seen as transgressing the boundaries of humanity, and were thus seen as sub-human

    • E.g. “guerilla”, “Yicosos” (drug addicts), “rateros” (thieves), “transvestis” (transvestities)

    • Fear of phantasmic powers of nature + the people who use it to transgress to non-human states = Plan Colombia’s war on drugs became a “limpieza”

    • Limpieza = A form of spiritual purging

      • E.g. Onlookers yelling “Son de Limpieza!” (they are doing a cleansing!)

The phantom and law-making violence

  • Violence doesn’t just come from the drug trade, but it’s rather produced by the law itself

    • Public executions by paramilitaries are usually state-sponsored, or the state are @ least complicit or turn a blind eye

    • This questions the common understanding of the law: that it helps limit violence

  • Laws try to reduce human inclination to violence so society can be organized

    • When war spreads, international law is a solution to re-establish order and peace

  • However, everyday forms of violence are performed through the law and its institutions

    • Police raids, limpiezas, executions

War on Drugs Paradox

  • War on Drugs identifies a paradox with the law and violence:

    • Drugs can’t be opposite of the law, because violence is created by aw

    • But violence isn’t all that the law is, because that would go against international law that helps mediate peaceful order of the international community and prevents world wars

  • Taussig: “The root of the ‘drug problem’ doesn’t lie with the people who take drugs, nor those who traffic them. Instead, it lies in the inevitable effects of prohibition”

    • Prohibition is what makes drugs valuable and the drug trade violent

Law, Violence, and the Drug War Paradox

  • Walter Benjamin (Taussig’s colleague): Theorizes the function of legal violence as law making or law preserving

    • Violence we see in law helps create and hold society together, as the law is able renew its rules and boundaries over and over

    • E.g. Impossible Criminals. Think about how law and mandated punishments changed in the U.S. WoD when the communities affected by the law changes (impacts black people - law gets tougher and more violent, impacts white people - law is loosened and white offenders are treated with care)

  • Violence goes beyond physical force

    • Includes the language used, the stories told, and the way law sets limits on what counts as legitimate knowledge or experience

    • E.g. Silencing certain communities (e.g. Indigenous communities in Latin America using coca in a ceremonial way) is considered a form of violence

  • In the Cali region of Colombia, we can also see that violence is shaped by the history of colonialism

    • Euro-modern worldview sees natural earth as resources to be exploited and consumed

    • This informs and justifies the eradication of nature and certain plants considered drugs

    • Ties back to that fear that these plants can “rule their creators”

  • The contemporary cocaine trade in Colombia mirrors the racialized history of slavery and gold production in the country

    • Mass shootings, crop eradication, and aerial fumigation policies of Plan Colombia disproportionately affected Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities

    • This makes the limpiezas connected to people who were already considered impure by colonialist ideas of the characterization of human beings

The pharmakon

  • We can understand more about the moral panic of drugs by learning the original social functions of drugs and how they differ from the neutral objective claims made in prohibitionist legislation

    • Desmond Manderson: the fear of drugs is not just the fear of the substances themselves, but rather “a fear of contamination”

    • Contamination = crossing/blurring the line between “human” and “nonhuman”, losing characteristics considered uniquely human (control, reason, morality)

  • Derrida: Suggests that the notion of pharmakon inspired the contemporary conceptualization of drugs

    • Pharmakon = Ancient Greek word that means both “remedy” and “poison”

    • Concept is used to show the double nature of drugs

    • The tension between opposites is unsettling for societies who want “internal purity and security” 

    • Why? Because blurred boundaries between things we consider opposites (e.g. health and danger, good and bad, medicine and poison) puts into question the classifications we created and follow every day

  • Rene Girard: Argues that things that can be considered pharmakon (with blurred boundaries) are sacrificed in order to maintain stability and present questioning in society

    • E.g. Certain drugs with possible medicinal benefits (LSD) fall within a pharmakon; they can both harm and help. Rather than exploring the various benefits and drawbacks of the substance, governments quickly deem them as dangerous and needing to be eradicated through prohibition. 

  • Stanley Cohen: Connects the fear of drugs to the concept of the societal folk-devil

    • Societal folk-devil = Concept that explains that the fear of certain things is that they can threaten the stability of the social order as a whole through their perceived ability to spread their affliction amongst the whole community

    • E.g. The fear of pot smoking in U.S. suburbia was deeply influenced by the fear of urban minority influences spreading and taking over white affluent communities, not just the fear of the dangers of pot smoking on individual health

Conclusion

  • The transgressive element of “transgressive substances” = the threat and ability of these drugs to overturn the Eurocentric version of how we imagine human life and social order

  • The phantom element of phantasmal commodities = their ability to summon the nonhuman tat lurks within human society (desire, loss of control, violence)

  • Drugs carry a social life (commodity fetishism) as they affect semantic, political, economic, and bioethical knowledge

  • The legal fiction on what substances are considered drugs, as well as the moral panic connected to these drugs, drive law making and law preserving violence

  • Since the 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission, there has been both support and critique of the WoD

    • Many scholars and activists seek to dismantle the foundations the WoD is built upon

    • They describe prohibition as an approach that might seem good on paper, but are murderous and self-defeating in practice

  • This article connects the violence used to enforce drug laws with the way the law actually creates the whole idea of drugs

    • How the law names, defines, and legislates them

  • Goal of prohibition is not just to control substances, but to totally transform how we see the world through law

    • To remake our view of reality so that certain plants and chemicals are threats to all of humanity

  • This thinking reached its peak at political moments like the 1998 United Nations “Special Session on Drugs,” which pushed for the dream of a completely drug-free world

  • The dream of erasing drugs from the world depends on the idea that drugs are transgressive

    • They break the rules on what’s pure and good, so the law needs to fix this

  • Drugs are also a threat to capitalism due to the way they can “rule their creators” - providing additional fuel to law enacted violence against them

  • Overall, the law, the media, lawmakers, and politicians, make drugs seem like a threat to humanity itself

    • This allows them to eradicate substances, as well as minority populations associated with the substances

  • By understanding how different cultures and time periods have seen drugs, we can better understand where today’s extreme fear comes from, and star to ask deeper questions about what’s really driving this fear

Lecture 6 - WoD Goes Global

Introduction

  • Although the WoD originated in the U.S., it quickly became the most widely adopted international campaigns

    • WoD was central in shaping world order since WWII

    • Is a driving force behind policy decisions and justification for government actions

  • WoD has been a cause of many forms of violence around the world

Exporting the WoD

  • 21st century: International law aimed at fighting drugs had been created mainly based on U.S. model

    • U.S. model = cutting off supply + abstinence

  • 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs

    • Asked for countries to criminalize the production, sale, and possession of drugs

    • Also looked to make it harder for offenders to get early release or parole

    • Made it easier for people accused of drug-related crimes to be extradited to the U.S for harsher punishment

  • 1990s: UN called for a “Decade against Drug Abuse”

    • Aim was to make laws more similar and enforceable around the world

    • “more similar” = more like the American model

  • Spread of the American model was partly due to “soft power” (U.S. influenced other countries through diplomacy, culture, and political pressure rather than just force and economic power)

Neoliberalism and the WoD

  • Neoliberalism = Economic philosophy and system that operates on the notion that a “society” is composed of individuals acting out of self-interest

    • Argues that societies are not collective wholes

    • Highest virtues: freedom, personal choice, individualism

    • Competition in free markets are seen as the best way to meet people’s needs and desires

  • Neoliberal economics encourage:

    • Global free trade

    • Maximum competiton

    • Individual choice

    • Private ownership

    • Deregulation

    • Minimal government role in matter like taxes and welfare

  • Global WoD has mainly occurred in the same era as the spread of neoliberalism (two very American based initiatives)

    • Scholars argue that the two are deeply connected and reinforce each other

Colombia Case Study

  • 1960s - 1990s: Colombia underwent agricultural reforms and deindustrialization

    • Led by International Monetary Fund

    • Was to improve agricultural efficiency and reduce the overreliance on volatile oil exports, as well as to diversify the economy

    • Contributed to the rise of the illegal drug economy (as agriculture rose) and strengthening of armed groups like FARC 

      • FARC = Leftists guerilla movement

  • Response to the rise of illegal drug trade and armed groups: Plan Colombia

    • Funded by the U.S. 

    • Efforts in “expanding the rule of law” was led by private paramilitary groups

    • Led to a lot of violence

      • 1998 - 2008 = over 30,000 deaths and the displacement of 3.4 million people due to Plan Colombia

  • Plan Colombia actually helped armed groups like FARC

    • Worsened rural poverty through crop fumigation, forced eradication of coca plants, and militarization of the countryside

    • Alienated local residents

    • Displacement, insecurity, and poverty, provide opportunities for armed groups to rise

Mexico Case Study

  • 1994: North American Free Trade Agreement (AKA NAFTA) was signed

  • The signing of NAFTA transformed Mexico’s role in international drug trade though 3 effects:

    • Increased cross border traffic - making drugs easier to smuggle

    • Caused economic disruption and poverty for many - pushing more people to go to drugs as a way to earn money

    • Created a climate in which Mexican crime syndicates could grow - also through poverty and civil unrest

  • Security collabs between the U.S. and Mexico increased through the Merida Initiative (2008-2021)

    • Merida initiative = Program of security cooperation between the 2 countries with shared responsibilities to tackle drug-related violence 

    • U.S. supplied money, weapons, and training

    • Used the “Kingpin strategy” = strategy of tackling drug related vioilence by removing cartel leaders

  • Cost of the Merida Initiative: Deaths

    • 2006-2020 Mexico: > 260,000 deaths and > 60,000 disappearances from drug-war related violence

    • U.S. also experienced an increase in deaths related to drug war violence

Afghanistan, the WoD, and the War on Terror

  • Post 9/11, stopping oppy cultivation in Afghanistan became a U.S. priority

    • Poppies are the base for heroin

    • Was an effort combined with combating terrorism

  • However, the WoT led to a hug increase in poppy production

    • Conflict destroyed alternative economic opportunities for Afghans

    • Increased border and airport security only led to more arrests at checkpoints, not a reduced production of poppies

  • WoT combined with the WoD was full of contradictions

    • Government crackdowns on use and trade made the drug market more profitable and persistent

The WoD as a Colonial Continuity

  • The global spread of the WoD maintains colonial structures and suppresses indigenous practices

    • Bolivia passed strict laws on coca leaf possession after pressure from the U.S. - even though it has deep cultural and traditional significance

    • The Mexican government use the WoD as rational for cracking down indigenous groups like the Zapatistas

  • Even when indigenous groups weren’t involved in illegal drug trade, the military justified raids and repression as anti-drug measures

  • Think Koram’s Phantasmal Commodities - the WoD extends colonial colour lines to a global scale

    • Colour lines = policies that continue to target marginalized racial, ethnic, and cultural groups

Exploring Alternatives on the War on Drugs

  • Countries have trouble making alternatives to the WoD

    • However, some countries have started new approaches

  • E.g. The Portugal Model

    • 2000: Portugal decriminalized all drugs

    • People who were found with drugs were sent to “dissuasion panels” for support and treatment (not jailed)

    • Altered funding so that 90% of money went to treatment and 10% went to enforcement

    • Results:

      • Addiction rates dropped 50%

      • HIV transmission rates fall by 95%

      • Overall drug use decreased

Conclusions

  • Consequences on the American-led WoD can be seen in other nations

    • Mass incarceration, the rise of organized crime in Mexico and Colombia, health harms

  • The WoD is a symbol of opposition to drugs and a real war resulting in violence, displacement, and lasting trauma

  • Koram argues in Phantasmic Commodities that the WoD has become a total indefinite conflict, which goes against international law’s purpose of constraining war

    • Has led to violence between countries and between states and their citizens

  • Now the WoD is able to justify neoliberal American policies globally by treating all drugs as threats to neoliberalism values

  • The WoD also provides justification for continuing colonial practices by keeping minority populations stuck in poverty and in the carceral system

  • While cracks appear in the system and new approaches are being tested, the global WoD is still a powerful and persistent movement

Week 9

Vrecko - “‘Civilizing Technologies’ and the control of deviance”

Vrecko: Managing Addiction and Behavioural Addictions

Abstract

  • Vrecko focuses on approaches to managing addiction through analysis of accounts and approaches to “behavioural addictions”

  • As seen in other articles (Social Construction of Alcohol Dependence), the biomedical model of addiction is often criticized as it has often been scientific justification for forms of social control

  • Vrecko argues that addictions medicine and the biomedical approach are still legitimate in framing behavioural addictions as brain diseases

    • There might be physiological components to behavioural compulsions

    • Effective addiction therapies can act on the bodies of patients

  • Perhaps the best way to look at addiction is as a hybrid - shaped by both our bodies and our societies

  • Vrecko is also against calling behavioural compulsions as diseases and therapeutic interventions as treatments

    • Instead, he wants us to call addiction therapeutic interventions “civilizing technologies,” because they are used to produce better citizens by addressing their behavioural compulsions

Introduction

  • The definition of addiction is created thanks to social and historical developments

  • As the rules and technologies for diagnosis and treatment evolve, so do our definitions of what counts as addiction

  • Called “bootstrapping” - building ideas up out of practical steps

    • Benefits of the bootstrapping process of defining addiction is that it ensures that we already have a way to systematically study, understand, and treat addiction

    • Since the definition comes after these technologies are discovered/improved

    • Risk of bootstrapping: people forget that definitions are temporary and contextually dependent, especially when we employ a definition for a long period of time

    • This makes addiction seem like a fixed and universal category - leading it to shape social life and government policies

  • If behavioural addictions are in fact addictions, it’s because we have included them to our current definition of addiction

  • We have socially defined addictions and added behavioural compulsions to that definition

  • Even though addiction is socially defined, we shouldn’t understand it through only social explanations

    • The same way that scholars say that we cannot understand addiction purely through biological terms

  • Cultural analyses of addiction medicine can be strengthened by acknowledging the biological component to behavioural compulsions

  • Vrecko supports his arguments by analyzing two key works

    • Sedgwick’s Epidemics of the Will - a cultural critique that ignores modern addiction science

    • Hacking’s work on behavioural compulsions informed by contemporary addiction science

  • Vrecko also looks at cases of addiction treatment that are the hardest to explain in purely social terms

    • The most biologically focused approaches to managing behavioural compulsions (e.g., managing compulsive behavior with “anti-craving” medications)

Biological and Cultural Matters in Behavioural Addictions

  • The differences between drug and non-drug addictions have blurred over time

  • Late 1980s: Brain scientists agreed that the addictiveness of certain substances and behaviours could be understood by how they similarly affect the brain’s control of emotions and motivation

  • Drug use was seen as rewarding to the brain

  • Addictive substances were described to activate the brain’s “pleasure systems” in ways that ordinary behaviours (sex and eating) could too

  • “Dopamine hypothesis” = explanation based in evidence that activating the dopamine system was the common denominator of all compulsions

  • Linking addictiveness to the brain led to both substance and behavioural addictions starting to get taken more seriously

  • 1993: High and Hooked report by the Economist was published

    • Demonstrated the new ideas of behavioural compulsions from the 80s

    • Photo montage includes both drug paraphernalia (syringes, vials) and roulette wheels, running shoes, and a Nintendo Gameboy

    • Article tells readers that behaviors can produce similar effects to drugs like cocaine and heroin, and that compulsive forms of sex, gaming, shopping etc. might not be in a different class from drug addiction

    • Said we can think of both drug addicts and those with behavioral compulsions as “dopamine heads”

  • Sedgwick also looked at different ideas on behavioural problems, but it was very different from the brain science perspective found in High and Hooked

    • Her Epidemics of the Will essay argued that any behaviour or substance had the potential to be seen as addictive

    • What specific behaviour or substance is deemed addictive is based on whether or not society wants to control people through controlling it

    • Explained that framing behaviours and substance use as addictions is used in societies to demand more self-control

      • Especially towards people who feel less socially constrained in their life (people that like to gamble and smoke pot even though they are shunned upon)

    • This perspective on defining and treating addiction as a method of social control explains why treatments are often focused on reflecting self monitoring and control (e.g., the 12 step program and self help groups)

  • Although Sedgwick’s work is impactful for highlighting social and cultural influence on defining addiction and using addiction interventions for social control, there are pitfalls

    • Because she doesn’t mention the bioscientific approaches to addiction at all in her work, her work might be dismissed as irrelevant today (since biomedical approaches are predominant)

    • Her work raises the question if addiction is just about discourse, identity, labelling, and control

    • Might be unaffirming for those struggling with addiction

    • Can also halt the progress of developing technologies to treat addiction and compulsions

  • Vrecko argues that, rather than looking at addiction as purely biological or purely cultural/social, we should mesh the two in order to best tackle the issue

Neurobiological Kinds

  • Social and cultural theorists: Addiction is a social construction that allows social control of behaviors deemed deviant

  • Biological essentialists: Addiction is a biological disorder that should be treated like other diseases

  • Common denominator between these two views is that they haven’t changed

    • Social and cultural theorists believe addiction has always been a social construction, and biological essentialists believe it has always been and will always be a biological disorder

  • Vrecko argues that addiction has changed

    • Withdrawal doesn’t characterize addiction the way it used to in the 20th century

    • Being considered an addict no longer means that you are being physiologically changed by a drug

    • Nowadays, the addict is drug-independent

      • Less about the body on drugs, and more about the individual’s and their body’s desires to use and relapse

  • Hacking’s analysis of “human kinds” (1995 and 2002) describes how biological science and medical interventions are involved in cultural change

    • As new theories and tools develop for studying humans and how they are classified, new classifications of humans arise

    • You can become a part of a new group of “people”

    • (e.g., “dopamine head” term from the Economist arose after developments in neuroscience found that dopamine centers are central to behavioural and substance use compulsions)

    • (e.g., Individuals suffering from compulsive behaviours can reject the notion that they are weak willed. They can draw upon knowledge from Harvard trained scientists to show that it isn’t their character, but rather complex biological chains and systems based in ancient survival mechanisms that are the roots of addictive behaviour)

  • This doesn’t mean that “behavioral addicts” only emerged in the 1990s, since there have been accounts of behavioural addicts in the 1950s with Gamblers Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous

    • Hacking’s work is just a suggestion on how some behavioural addictions are understood and experienced

Pharmaceuticals and the Neurotyping of Behavioural Addictions

  • A wide range of psychopharmaceuticals have been used to manage behavioral compulsions, with some success (e.g., mood stabilizers, tranquilizers, antidepressants)

  • Issues arise because psychopharmaceutical use as a treatment for addictions allows people to misinterpret addictions as rooted in another, unrelated mental disorder

    • (e.g., SSRIs have been used to manage pathological gambling, but people have used this to indicate that gambling problems arise in relation to a depressive disorder instead of an addictive one)

  • Late 1990s: Naltrexone started to be used in managing behavioural compulsions

    • Naltrexone is an opiate antagonist and anti-craving medication originally used in treating heroin addiction and alcoholism, acting on the endorphin and dopamine systems

    • The efficacy of naltrexone on managing certain compulsions allowed these compulsions to be viewed as addictions

    • Because naltrexone acts directly on the brain’s reward system which is central to all addictions

    • Provided objective evidence that behavioural compulsions are addiction-like brain problems

    • If pathological gambling isn’t an addiction, then why would an addiction treatment work on it

  • Anti-craving medications started to be used and proven effective on other problems (e.g., compulsive sexual activity, urge driven shopping, buying, and stealing)

    • The efficacy of anti-craving medications on behavioural compulsions also changed how the media viewed these problems

      • Highlighted claims about the addictive nature of behavioural problems

      • Highlighted that pharmacotherapy (medicine therapy dampening dopamine system) could also work on cigarette smoking, chocolate, pot, and anything else with craving

  • Anti-craving medications allowed scientists, clinicians, and researchers to identify the difference between individuals with similar behavioural compulsions

    • Finding that some people respond well to naltrexone but others don’t allowed them to distinguish different “subspecies” that can be understood and managed in different ways

    • (e.g., Differing responses to naltrexone can help identify who is struggling with intense uncontrollable gambling compulsions, and who is struggling with undiagnosed ADHD in which incessant gambling is a symptom)

  • The emergence of anti-craving pharmaceuticals has led scientists to ask for a new method of neurotyping behavioural addictions

    • Instead of classifying them by the type of behaviour they share, but rather the “endophenotype” and mind/brain state they share

    • Endophenotype = The biomarker that connects behavioral symptoms with structural phenotypes linked to genetic causes

    • (e.g., the response (or lack thereof) to naltrexone can be considered an endophenotype. A compulsive shopper, a compulsive gambler, and a sex addict could all be part of the same group if they have the same mind/brain state and resistance to naltrexone)

  • Important to note, however, that anti-craving medications don’t actually treat or cure the brain into a normal state

    • All they do is lessen the feeling of impulse and desire and reduce the risk of engaging in a socially problematic behaviour

  • Instead, we can think of anti-craving medications as a civilizing technology

    • They are used to get people in a state where they are healthier, more responsible, and more able to fulfill their social and familial expectations

    • Norbert Elias (sociologist) suggests that anti-craving medications can be used in a civilizing process

      • Civilization (as a process) = A transformation of human behaviour

      • Behaviours are civilized in the following way

        • A standard code of conduct for the behaviour emerges

        • Individuals are compelled to regulate their conduct in a more even and stable manner based on the code

        • (e.g., An individual takes NAC to regulate their behaviour of weed smoking so it is stable and more socially acceptable — smoking 1/day becomes 1/week)

  • Critique on only using civilizing technologies like meds

    • It enforces notions that the neurobiological root of compulsions lies in something “primitive” — almost animalistic

    • Sheds a bad light on addicts

      • (e.g., What was mentioned above — “They can draw upon knowledge from Harvard trained scientists to show that it isn’t their character, but rather complex biological chains and systems based in ancient survival mechanisms that are the roots of addictive behaviour”)

    • It lets people think that some people and cultures are more civilized than others

      • (e.g., In communities in which anti-craving medications and addictions interventions aren’t accessible, people might think they’re less civilized since they don’t engage in civilizing processes related to regulating addiction)

  • Instead, Vrecko uses the concept of civilizing technologies to show how behavioural addiction can be regulated in a biological way, rather than just through social control

Conclusion

  • In order for addictions medicine to effectively tackle the issue of addiction, we mustn’t define it as just a biological disease nor just a social construct

  • Vrecko shows that developments in the biosciences are involved in the process of social change and regulation

  • Advances in science allow us to change our definitions of concepts like addiction by discovering new characteristics of the concept

  • Viewing addiction socially as a “lack of will power and self control” remains powerful

    • This view is used to keep commodity fetishism and unlimited demand in check

    • It also highlights the value of neoliberalist ideals of self-discipline

    • It urges individuals to constantly monitor and keep themselves in check

  • However, the biological views of addiction can also be powerful in changing individuals into being responsible and autonomous

    • Through civilizing processes such as anti craving medication

Lecture 7 - The Advent of Behavioural Addictions

Introduction

  • Concept of addiction was originally focused on substances

    • Sparked debates on whether compulsions came from something inherent of the person or inherent of the substance

    • E.g. Early addiction theory wondered if alcoholism came from a flawed personality, biological disease, or just a pattern of individual choices

  • Fundamental questions on the root cause of addiction carry weight

    • Determines how er approach treatment, prevention, and social policies

  • Recently, addiction concept has been expanded to encompass behaviours

    • Gambling, sex, shopping, gaming

  • The transition to including behavioural compulsions is awkward and controversial

    • Because society needs to adapt the old ideas of substance addiction to include behavioural issues

Revisiting Addiction - AA and the Spread of the Nonymous Model

  • 19th century: Doctors already thought of inebriety (chronic drunkenness) as being hereditary

  • Post WWI: Susceptibility (idea that some people are just more prone to addiction) became common

    • Dr. Silkworth described alcoholism as an “allergy”

      • Beyond a habit or choice, but rather a chronic and physiological problem that causes some people to lose control

    • Silkworth’s ideas and the allergy model influenced Alcoholics Anonymous (1930s)

      • AA claims alcoholism is a spiritual disease

      • Framing allows people to admit their powerlessness and pursue change through mutual aid (12 step program)

  • “Anonymous Model” spread

    • Broader culture started to approach addiction as a chronic and incurable disease

    • Abstinence was seen as the only solution

    • Creation of Gamblers Anonymous (1957) is a notable example of the anonymous model even spreading to behavioural addictions

    • Addictions such as pathological gambling (DSM-III) to emerge in the DSM

  • There were problems with applying the addiction disease (not AA) model to behavioural compulsions

    • The problem: Most people engaged in these behaviours without developing problems

      • People shop, game, and have sex every day, but having problems with them are rare

  • The AA model sidesteps this issue

    • It frames addictions as spiritual disease, not biological ones

    • There’s no need to have biological evidence

    • It allows people to be destigmatized, providing opportunity for acceptance and change

Addiction’s Awkward Transition

  • The drawback of the AA model application to behavioural compulsions: it can be seen as excusing bad behaviour by still labelling it as a disease

  • Late 20th century: The field of addictions medicine was heavily focused on behavioural compulsions

    • Groups formed for all sorts of issues (eating, gaming, porn watching) 

      • Used the disease/addiction model

      • Relied on notions of compulsion and loss of control

  • Brown and Griffiths (scholars) provided keys for diagnosing behavioural addictions:

    • Salience - behaviour dominates thoughts

    • Mood modification - the behaviour gives them a buzz or changes their mood

    • Tolerance - Needing more for the same effect

    • Withdrawal - Feeling bar or uncomfortable when you stop

    • Conflict - Internal or external problems stemming from the behaviour

    • Relapse

  • Brown and Griffith’s work were informed by substance abuse models

Emergence of Sex Addiction

  • Sex addiction developed similarly to gambling addiction

    • Started from ideas like “nymphomania” (behaviour of women who like to have sex often and with a lot of different people) in earlier decades

    • They are both behavioural addictions defined via the AA model

    • Push for medicalization of these behaviours came from below (from laypeople, not scientists and clinicians)

  • 1970s: Sex and love addiction emerged

    • Boston AA member adapted the 12 step program to address masturbation, impersonal sex, emotional dependency, and affairs

    • Sex addiction was viewed through the AA lens, shame and a loss of control, fixed by sexual sobriety and communal healing

    • Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous spread and was widely accepted

  • 1983: Patrick Carnes (clinician) published his book The Sexual Addiction

    • Suggested there are levels of severity in sex addictions

      • Level 1: Strip clubs, porn, sex workers, affairs, gay activity

      • Level 2: Exhibitionism, voyeurism, obscene phone calls

      • Level 3: Rape, incest, child molestation

    • Helped create screening tools, journals, and new forms of diagnosis

      • Journal of Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, Sexual Addiction Screening Test

  • Sex addiction, however, has been thoroughly challenged

    • Gendered ideas influence who gets labelled as a sex addict (i.e. nymphomaniacs (women) compared to men (who are less criticized for being very sexually active))

    • Compared to substance addiction, which is measured by monotony and repetition of use, sex addiction is diagnosed based on the variety and novelty of sexual escapades

      • Risks labelling normal sexual behaviour as pathological

    • DSM-5 rejected the addition of sex addiction because of the risk of producing too many false positives

    • Might provide a medical excuse for immoral conduct

    • The shame seen in people labelled as sex addicts comes often from cultural attitudes towards sex, not biological disease

      • Think love v. lust, monogamy v. polyamory

    • Calling “abnormal” sexual activity a “disease” still can attach it to the vice perspective

      • But it also makes the concern larger as a “disease” entails “objective” criteria from experts

  • E.g. Young’s Online Sex Addiction Test

    • Has questions like:

      • Do you spent time sexting just for cybersex?

      • Do you feel shame?

      • Do you hide your online interactions from your s/o?

      • If you selected YES to ANY of the above questions, you might be addicted to online sex

    • It illustrates how the line between moral concern and clinical diagnosis is blurred

      • Medical questionnaires might be loaded with morel judgements when looking at sex addiction

How can we explain sex addiction’s arrival?

  • Janice Irvine (scholar): Sex addiction as a category is a late 20th century response to social anxieties

    • End of sexual revolution, HIV/AIDS crisis, feminist debates about porn

    • Sex was increasingly seen as risky and harmful

      • Especially outside of conventional boundaries

    • Whenever norms around pleasure are violated, the fear that it’s an addiction follows suit

Concerns

  • Clinicians often accept disease based approaches to behavioural addictions, however they might need to caution against them

  • Ferentzy and Turner (scholars) highlight this concern

    • Insistence of abstinence can ignore alternative and maybe more effective respoonses

    • All or nothing disease framework ignores that problematic behaviours are a spectrum

    • “hitting rock bottom” discourages preventative care

    • Focusing on biological or personal spiritual issues ignores social factors

      • Think back to Vrecko’s paper; we should look at behavioural addictions as a blend of social and biological explanations

Conclusions

  • Applying addiction concepts to behaviour draws heavily on the AA model

  • The push to recognize behavioural addictions have come often from laypeople

  • Behavioural addictions remain contested

    • Sex addiction shows that we don’t need scientific consensus to create and treat a perceived epidemic

  • Identifying and treating addiction can act as a method to regulate social behaviour

  • Some people embrace behavioural addictions while also rejecting the concept of disease

    • Can acknowledge compulsive porn watching as an addiction, while also refuting that it is due to biological issue 

Week 10

Bhargava and Velasquez - “Ethics of the Attention Economy: The Problem of Social Media Addiction”

Introduction

  • Typical businesses: The user of the product/service is the source of revenue

  • Attention economy business = Business in which the user’s attention is the product, and advertisers or other buyers are the source of revenue

    • Usually ad-based businesses

    • E.g. Newspapers, radio, network TV

  • Most valuable and influential attention economy businesses: Social media companies

    • Facebook/IG, Snap, Twitter

  • There’s been a lot of focus on how social media has been used to pursue wrongful ends, which includes:

    • Bullying

    • Influencing geopolitical events (e.g. 2016 U.S. presidential election)

    • To generate outrage in order to pressure an employer into firing an employee

    • To polarize social groups

  • Even though these uses are all current problems, these aren’t the focus of this paper

  • Focus of this paper: How social media companies design their products and platforms in ways that make them addictive

    • Argument: The design of these social media products and platforms raise ethical concerns, even when people don’t misuse them

  • Internet addiction gets a lot of attention in scholarly literature and in the press

    • Investors in Facebook and Apple have talked about the addiction problem in teens associated with their companies

  • Internet addiction has also gotten government response from some countries:

    • China - declared it as a public health hazard

    • South Korea - also named it a public health issue

    • China, South Korea, Japan, UK, Netherlands, US - Have clinics aimed at treating internet addiction

  • Issue: There is nothing about the business ethics of creating addictive social media platforms

    • Social media businesses, the ones creating these addictive platforms, are not being addressed

  • How large social media companies get their platform and product updates: 

    • Designed and implemented by small groups of engineers in smaller companies

    • They are bought by social media companies and then widely deployed

On the Nature of Internet Addiction

  • Since the late 90s, clinicians and scholars have been claiming that excessive internet use should be recognized as an addiction

  • However, recognizing excessive internet use as an addiction has had controversies (think about the reluctance of including behavioural compulsions, like compulsive shopping, into the category of addiction)

    • There are many theories of addiction (disease model, vice model, cost-benefit analysis AKA choice theory…)

    • There are many definitions of addiction (DSM-5, ICD-11, nonclinical definitions like in dictionaries) 

  • The 1st time behavioural addictions were clinically recognized was in 2013

    • Was included in the DSM-5

    • However, excessive internet use hasn’t yet been classified by the APA (even though it is now widely accepted as an addiction)

  • In this paper, the authors used the Griffiths definition of addiction (mentioned in Vrecko’s paper) because they overlap with the DSM and ICD, and it is widely accepted

    • 6 criteria

      • Salience

      • Mood modification

      • Tolerance

      • Withdrawal

      • Conflict

      • Relapse

  • Why internet addiction is widely accepted as an addiction:

    • Fills the same criteria as other addictions

    • Activates similar brain areas as other addictions (functional neuroimaging studies)

    • Same molecular pathways (e.g. dopaminergic) are being implicated

  • Caveat with the term internet addiction: it is really an umbrella term as there are more than one types of internet addiction

    • General internet addiction = An addiction to the internet in all forms

    • Specific internet addictions = An addiction to specific activities accessed through the internet

      • E.g. Social networking, gaming, gambling, information searching, accessing online porn

    • Young (scholar) argued that there should be 5 subtypes of internet addictions:

      • Cyber sexual addiction

      • Cyber relationship/social media addiction

      • Net compulsions (gambling, shopping, day trading)

      • Information overload (web surfing and info searching)

      • Computer addiction (gaming)

  • This paper focuses on two subtypes of internet addiction:

    • General internet addiction

    • Cyber relationship/social media addiction

General Internet Addiction

  • Surprisingly high prevalence among adults and young

    • A meta analysis of 31 international students estimated that 6% of the world’s population had become addicted to the internet

    • A survey in 2012 found that 4.4% of European teens were addicted

    • Anderson (2001) found that 9.8% of US college students were addicted

    • An online survey in 2002 found that 9.6% of US respondents were addicted

  • Higher prevalence in Asian populations than in Western groups

    • 18% of Chinese hs students and 12% of Chinese uni students were addicted

    • 20% of Taiwanese teens were internet addicted

Social Media Addiction

  • Epidemiological research is less mature compared to general internet addiction

  • However, studies have shown a significant prevalence of social media addiction amongst younger users

    • A survey of 884 Nigerian students found that 27% of them were addicted to social media

    • A study of Chinese college students found that 12% of their sample was addicted

    • A study of 1,870 Indian students found that 36.9% of them were addicted

  • There are also studies showing the prevalence among adult users:

    • 59% of 313 social media users felt they were addicted (both youth and adults)

  • Overall, social media addiction is a global issue affecting both young people and adults

  • Common design elements that make social media addictive:

    • Slot machine effect = The use of intermittent variable rewards (i.e. Temu reward carousel)

    • Features that take advantage of our desires for social validation and reciprocity (e.g. Likes, comments) 

    • Platform designs that erode natural stopping cues

  • Social media companies get more data the more time people spend on the platforms

    • This data helps them figure out which strategies work and which ones don’t

    • They look at things like:

      • Background colours and fonts

      • Audio tones

      • Rewards

Slot Machine Effect

  • Rewards that vary in frequency and magnitude are more effective in maintaining a behaviour 

    • Compared to a consistent, predictable reward

  • E.g. The blue loading screen when opening Twitter

    • The delay in loading is not due to slow hardware or internet, it is designed to be that way

    • The delay is inconsistent, and the reward is access to the platform

  • E.g. Pinterest images

    • As user scrolls to the bottom of the page, some images seem to be cut off

    • The cut off images offer a glimpse of what’s ahead, which gets them to keep scrolling

    • The images are the reward

  • E.g. The “pull-to-refresh” feature in Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok

    • Mimics the motion and variable reward schedule of a slot machine

    • The time it takes to refresh is variable, and the post that are revealed also vary

Features that Touch on Social Validation and Reciprocity

  • E.g. Streaks on Snapchat

    • Runs a tally on the # of days a user has exchanged snaps with another user

    • Teens face pressure to maintain these streaks

  • E.g. Facebook and IG like button

    • Social validation is quantified by the # of likes

The Erosion of Natural Stopping Cues

  • E.g. Infinite scrolls (most common technique)

    • End of a page used to be the natural stopping cue

      • Allows them to think about loading the next page, exiting the platform…

    • Nowadays, infinite scrolls removed the opportunity to stop and reflect on whether or not to leave the platform

The Impermissibility of Making Social Media Addictive

  • Paper mentions 3 moral arguments on the social media addiction problem:

    • It is wrong to use social media platforms to addict users and the harms outweigh the costs addictive technologies produce

    • Users are social media platforms are demeaned, adding insult to injury

    • Addicting users to social media is a form of exploitation

The Harm Argument

  • Harms related to general internet addiction:

    • Less time devoted to studies —> poor academic performance

    • Using the internet at work —> poor work performance

  • Harms related to social media addiction:

    • Amongst young people, the more time spent on social media —> the more unhappy the are

    • Increased depression with increased social media use

    • Immediate lowered mood that increases the longer the period on social media

  • Harms related to both general internet addiction and social media addiction:

    • Increased levels of anxiety and depression

    • Lowered levels of face-to-face social relationships

    • Additional time to refocus attention on other activities

  • Overall, the addicted social media user experience issues with:

    • School and work

    • Sleeping

    • Caring for themselves

    • Health 

    • Social life

  • The harms introduced by internet addiction (particularly social media addiction) are morally significant

    • Are related to human dignity

  • Comparing the issues of internet addictions to Nussbaum’s 10 capabilities required for an individual’s dignity (focuses on 7/10)

    • Life

      • Studies have shown those with internet addictions are more likely to have suicidal ideation

      • These people think about suicide, and have higher rates of planning and attempts

    • Bodily health

      • Teens with internet addictions (incl social media) have poor sleep quality, used more alcohol and tobacco

      • They also eat more irregularly and had poor diets

      • They engage in less exercise and physical activity

    • Senses, Imagination and thought (2 combined abilities)

      • Association between social media addiction and the ability to reason accurately or think clearly

      • They also engage in less activities that require concentrated thought

    • Emotions

      • Suffer from a host of emotional deficits: depression, low self esteem, social anxiety

      • Also face issues with others: Alienation from family and peers, hostility towards others, poor interpersonal relationships

    • Practical reason

      • Those with a social media addiction are less satisfied with how their lives progressed

      • They also report having low levels of control over the courses of their life

      • They also have less ability to plan into the future

      • Social media addictions (like all other addictions) damage autonomy since individuals are less able to prevent social media from taking over their lives

    • Affiliation

      • Social media addictions are associated with social isolation and loneliness

      • Those with internet addictions in all forms engage in fewer social activities, spend less time with loved ones, and experience less family closeness

    • Play

      • Those with internet addictions (except for online gaming addictions) have little time to participate in sports or other recreational activities

      • They also have less time and ability to enjoy recreational activities

  • Therefore, it can be argues that internet addictions (particularly social media addiction) limits individuals’ ability to live a life of dignity

  • Can say that these harms are violations to the addicted person’s rights, making those who impose these harms (social media companies) morally wrong

  • 1st objection to the morally wrong argument: the causality issue

    • Correlational studies are used to support the morally wrong argument, therefore there isn’t a proven causation relationship between social media and its associated harms

    • Also, the relationship between these issues and social media addiction can be bidirectional (e.g. someone who already experiences isolation might turn to social media to feel connected, individuals who are depressed might turn to social media as an activity to do when stuck in their bed)

  • 2nd objection to the morally wrong argument: benefits outweigh the harms

    • Surgeries and medicines can lead to harms, but we nevertheless deem them harms justified because of the compensating benefits

    • Some argue that the aggregate benefits of social media platforms outweigh the aggregate harms of social media addiction

      • Social media platforms allow billions of people to communicate and interact

      • Social media platforms also allow people to stay educated in world news and organize social movements

Addressing the Causality Issue: Longitudinal and Experimental Studies

  • 2008 longitudinal study found that the use of chat and messenger features predicted the development of depressive symptoms 6 months later

    • And depressive symptoms weren’t able to predicts later addiction to social media (refutes the bidirectional causality argument)

  • 2010 longitudinal study of young subjects: Those who engaged in addicted use of the internet developed depressive symptoms 9 months later

  • 3 year longitudinal study in 2017: The more addicted the respondents became to using Facebook, the more their physical and mental health declined over the 3 years

    • Also led to lower assessments of life satisfaction

    • Also led to increased BMI

    • Respondents that were less addicted and devoted more time for real world interaction fared better in all of these variables

  • A 4 month long longitudinal study in 2018: Individuals who stopped using social media showed a reduction in depression levels (compared to control group who showed no change)

    • The decline in depression was strongest in those who were the most highly depressed before they stopped using social media

Addressing the “Benefits outweigh the harms” counterargument 

  • The features that make social media addictive do not contribute to the aggregate benefits of these platforms

    • You can keep the benefits even when removing the addictive features

  • Slot machine techniques, social validation rewards, and elimination of natural stopping cues do not help people get connected and educated

The Adding Insult to Injury Argument

  • Social media websites add insult to the injury imposed on addicts in a way that demeans and disrespects them

  • E.g. Adaptive algorithms

    • Adaptive algorithms = Algorithms in social media that adjust the content they feed each specific user in order to keep them engaged for longer

    • They monitor the amount of time each kind of content keeps the user engaged for

    • The more they use the platform —> the more data the algorithm collects —> the more engaging the content becomes —> the more addicted the user becomes

  • Compared to older ways of using data to influence content (e.g. network tv programs), social media collects and uses data in real time

    • This means social media is constantly becoming more addictive to the user

      • Users don’t become tolerant compared to drug addictions (think; cigarettes don’t change themselves to become more addictive)

  • The added insult is that social media companies involve the user in the very process that makes the platform more addictive to them

    • The user is being used against themselves

  • E.g. Paternalistic policies compared to adaptive algorithms

    • Paternalistic policies = Government actions/laws that limit an individual’s liberty or autonomy for their own perceived good

    • People argue that they are “effectively telling citizens that they are too stupid to run their lives”

    • However others might say that these policies are in the best interest of the individual

    • Compared to paternalistic policies, adaptive algorithms basically tell the user that their individual interests do not matter

      • Social media companies take their data and keep them engaged even though they know it’s not in the best interest of the user

      • In paternalistic policies, @ least they take your best interest into account

The Exploitation Argument

  • Exploitation can be seen as taking advantage of a person’s vulnerability to advance one’s own needs

  • However, not all acts of exploitation are morally objectionable

    • For an act of exploitation to be morally objectionable, there needs to involve disrespect toward the exploited

  • The disrespect towards the exploited: the demeaning insult that disrespects the user when social media companies gather data from their use to make the platform more addictive

  • Social media companies are among the most lucrative businesses because they advance their own ends by getting their users addicted

  • 2 sources of vulnerability in social media users:

    • similar to the exploitation between drug dealers and their addicted buyers

      • Social media companies (dealer) exploits the desire/craving social media users have when they get addicted

    • the craving to engage when the people around them use social media

      • Because of the pervasiveness and unavoidability of the internet in our lives, this source of vulnerability is inescapable

        • As the majority of people use social media, non addicts are exposed to use and begin to crave going on the platform as well

        • Many professional jobs, and schools require internet use

          • E.g. LinkedIn, online databases for courses, Instagram accounts for university clubs

        • This is different compared to other addictions (gambling, heroin, marijuana, tv) because individuals can go through life without being exposed to the environmental cues of these addictions

          • You can spend your whole life never going to a casino, never watching porn, or never going into a bar

  • The pervasiveness of the internet makes children and teens the most vulnerable

    • Compared to other addictive substances or activities that are illegal for minors, the internet is licit

    • There are little to no barriers to a child’s internet use

    • Children face a perceived cost to not using the internet

      • E.g. All their friends use it, school clubs post important updates

    • Kids and teens are exposed to the internet @ a time when they lack full moral agency and are the most susceptible to addiction

  • Some individuals are particularly vulnerable to becoming addicted to the internet (other than kids and teens)

    • Users with low self control have been shown to be especially vulnerable

    • Same with individuals with neuroticism (tendency to experience negative emotions like anxiety, anger, and depression, more frequently and intensely)

  • Overall, given how pervasive the internet is, and how hard it is for us to forgo it, addicting users to the internet is a serious sort of exploitation

A Business that Incentivizes Wrongdoing

  • For most businesses that provide addictive products (cigarette companies, alcohol manufacturers), addiction is subject to chance

    • Just a risk in their business model

    • These companies would be indifferent to whether customers use the products as intended, they just care about the customer purchasing it

    • This is also true for technology products that don’t have an attention economy business

      • e.g. Netflix since they don’t have ads and they’re in a subscription model, they only care if users keep subscribing and dgaf if they actually watch anything

  • For attention economy businesses (markedly social media companies) - they rely on keeping users as active as possible for as long as possible, so addiction provides them monetary benefits

    • The revenues come from advertisers

      • “with social media, you are not the customer, you are the product”

    • Advertisers will pay more to be featured on social media platforms with higher user engagement

  • There is a strong incentive on keeping users online for long times, even though it means that many users will become addicted

  • So even though it’s impermissible to get users addicted, not doing so means that social media companies will lose significant amounts of money

    • So there is an incentive to engage in wrongdoing

  • These incentives are what gets social media companies to invest in the development of addictive technologies, which often draw on science

    • Design elements that addict users were originally developed by engineers who used behavioural psychology to keep gamblers hooked on electronic gambling machines (EGMs)

    • A lot of these features modify things like:

      • Classical and operant conditioning

      • Cognitive biases

      • Dopamine signals

  • Nowadays, web design researchers have combined engineering and behavioural psychology to ensure website users are persuaded to behave in an ideal way

    • E.g. The Persuasive Technology Lab @ Stanford

  • However, the aim is not to argue that social media firms intentionally addict their users

    • Rather, the authors want to explain how social media firms addict their users regardless of whether or not they intend to do so

Implications for Theory and Practice

  • Businesses need to acknowledge that they need to account for engineering and design ethics 

    • Decisions in engineering are closely tied to business priorities and moral issues

    • Design and engineering choices that are made to make or save money can lead to serious ethical failures and harms

    • Scholars should recognize the overlap between business and engineering ethics

    • Company management should look at ethics more heavily when choosing design or engineering features

  • Education (esp teachers) should discourage children and teens from using social media, rather than teaching them to be more tech-savvy

    • Education on how to use the internet increases this vulnerable group to the internet

    • Just because a class uses more technology doesn’t mean that the kids are able to learn better

    • Think about it, Silicon Valley executives that literally work on improving social media send their children to low tech schools

  • Rather than focusing on the digital divide (the disparity in access to tech needed for education and professions between low and high income communities), researchers should focus on the digital use divide

    • Digital use divide = The increase in screentime in low income communities compared to high income communities

      • This could mean that teens and children in low income communities are the most vulnerable for exploitation of social media companies, and most prone to addiction

  • Design features firms should work on features that empower users to have healthier relationships with social media, rather than technologies that get them addicted

    • E.g. Usage statistics in iOS and on TikTok

  • Social media firms should be forward in stating that they are rendering their products more addictive

    • They should disclose their adaptive algorithms

    • Tech firms owe it to their users to make it clear that they’re using the users’ data to make the experience better and more addictive

    • This would lower the insult to injury harm

  • We should start taking seriously the possibility of eliminating social media from everyday life

    • Policy makers should lower the barriers users face to exit social media

      • Should make it easier to deactivate/delete an account

Lecture 8 - The Business of Addiction

Addiction as a Brain Issue

  • The increasing acceptance of behavioural addiction as a legitimate concept has shifted the focus of addiction research and discourse

    • Less focus on addictive substances, more focus on addictive behaviours

    • Increased analysis of individuals who label themselves addicts but not drug addicts

  • Traditional interpretations assumed addiction is a problem for only vulnerable individuals

  • Nowadays, researchers have concluded that pretty much anyone can be addicted to anything

  • The universality these researchers suggest can be explained through “pathological learning”

    • Pathological learning = Process in which the brain is trained through pleasurable rewards (i.e. dopamine spike) to develop a reflex/embedded memory

    • Reimagines addiction from a binary state (either addicted or not) —> a spectrum (everyone has varying degrees of susceptibility)

  • Courtwright argues that addiction businesses have exploited this universal susceptibility

    • They deliberately target the brain’s reward systems for commercial profit

    • “turning evolution’s handiwork to their own ends”

Limbic Capitalism

  • Another concept introduced by Courtwright

  • Limbic capitalism = A business design that targets the limbic system of individuals

    • Limbic system = Part of the brain responsible for emotion, feeling, and quick reaction

    • Goal of limbic capitalism: Encouraging excessive consumption and fostering addiction

  • Factors that increase an individual’s vulnerability to limbic capitalism tactics:

    • Psychological traits

      • Think in The Attention Economy paper - increased neuroticism and depressive + anxiety can increase the risk of addiction to social media

    • Broader social factors

      • The Attention Economy mentions that white teens from low income areas use social media for longer periods than those in higher income areas, making them more vulnerable to social media addictions

  • Deliberate scientific design of addictive products are new and due to advances in neuroscience, but the basic principles of limbic capitalism have been in place for much longer

    • Think EGMs (electronic gambling machines) - have existed before the internet and lie in behavioural psychology, not neuroscience

  • When criticism emerges, companies engage in lobbying efforts and PR campaigns to silence or discredit their critics

    • Lobbying = The act of trying to influence politicians/public officials on an issue

    • E.g. When Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly advised parents to limit children’s use of social media, rather than urging social media companies to make their platforms less addicting to children

  • Under limbic capitalism, addiction has become a legitimate and profitable business model

    • E.g. cigarette companies, casinos, social media companies, online shops 

Cigarette Smoking

  • By the early 20th century, cig smoking was widespread, especially among men

    • Associated with sophistication and self-discipline

      • Addictive potential and habit-forming nature was well recognized, however use was still accepted especially since cigarette smoking without addiction was seen as an act of self-discipline and delayed gratification

  • Cigarette marketing was strategically framed as a way to perform aspects of masculine identity

    • Ads emphasized rugged individualism, adventure, physical strength, rebellion, sophistication…

    • The “Marlboro Man” was an iconic campaign which positions smoking as integral to an idealized man

    • Chesterfield did an ad campaign focused on “Men of America” who smoked their cigs, missile engineers, soldiers. This linked their cigarettes to patriotism

  • Women didn’t really smoke during this period

    • Due to underlying gender disparities

      • Women were “too fragile” to smoke

      • Cigs were a threat to a woman’s “reproductive value”

      • Female smoking was disreputable

  • After WWI, the cultural meaning of smoking changed to represent women’s rights and suffrage

    • Was reframed as a tool women could use to challenge male dominance and assert independence

    • Ability to smoke publicly was seen as a freedom for women

    • E.g. “Freedom Torches” event in which women smoked cigarettes en masse, explicitly connecting smoking to women’s liberation

    • Female smokers gained the aura of sophistication

  • Cigarette companies jumped onto this wave

    • Marketing campaigns suggested smoking could help women stay slim and maintain their body

    • Different cig brands and campaigns were designed to appeal to specific feminine archetypes

      • Virginia Slims had the “You’ve come a long way” campaign, connecting smoking to women’s liberation

      • Lucky Strikes had a “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet”, linking smoking to weight loss and glamour

  • The success of cig marketing campaigns to women relied on commodification:

    • Identity was built by what things people had, and a person’s appearance dictated their social status

    • Cigs were seen as a beauty tool and a fashion accessory

    • Associating different cigs to different identity categories —> women felt like they could achieve a certain self concept through smoking certain cigs

Corporate Obfuscation

  • The harms of smoking were known well before regulatory action was taken

    • 1953: Cancer by the Carton  was published

    • 1963: Surgeon General’s report documented the dangers (including them being carcinogenic) 

  • The reason why it took so long for governing bodies to take action is because of the corporate obfuscation done by the tobacco industry

  • Corporate obfuscation = The deliberate use of language and marketing/PR techniques to obscure negative news of a businesses’ products

  • Attempts the tobacco industry made:

    • Product innovations that implied safer and “less addictive” ways of smoking

      • Filters, “light” cigs

    • Lobbying and bribes made politicians reluctant to regulate the sale and marketing of cigs

    • Formed coalitions to reframe ad regulation as “crackdown on personal liberty”

    • Poured millions into funding research that disputed the health harms 

      • Made groups of “experts” who could testify in court cases

    • Hired PR firms to promote the notion of ongoing scientific “debate” on smoking’s dangers

      • Argued for “balance” in the media - wanted the benefits and the harms of cigs to be spotlighted at the same frequency

The Fallout of the Tobacco Industry

  • Health consequences of smoking:

    • Still the leading cause of preventable death

    • Kills 20x more Canadians than all illegal drugs combined

  • Legal findings reveal to the masses that tobacco companies have systematically suppressed and altered evidence about smoking’s dangers

    • Showed the people that these companies did their best to make their products the most addictive and least feared, disregarding their customer’s health

  • Many states successfully sued the industry

    • Got settlements for the costs of smoking-related illnesses on Medicaid systems

    • Banned certain marketing practices

    • In Canada: $15 billion settlement

  • Tobacco case shows all the central elements of limbic capitalism

    • Knowingly targeting human vulnerability

    • Deliberately boosting product addictiveness

    • Extensive lobbying to precent regulating

    • Systematic obfuscation of scientific evidence

  • Rates of tobacco addiction only began to drop significantly after heavy regulation

    • Shows that market forces alone can’t address addiction-based business models

    • We need intense regulatory intervention to protect public health from these industries

The Opioid Crisis

  • Since the 90s, Rx drugs have obscured street narcotics in terms of social harms and addiction rates

    • Prescription opioids have more deaths than the death toll from heroin + death toll of cocaine

  • Most scholars blame widespread prescribing practices for the emergence of the opioid epidemic

    • 90s: Intro to OxyContin. Was a “revolution” in pain management and marketed as non addicting

      • Was widely prescribed to individuals even facing mild pain

      • Turns out oxy is super addictive, leading to individuals finishing their prescription hooked on the drug, and turning towards the illegal market for their fix

“Hillbilly Heroin”

  • The opioid problem was first seen in Ohio Valley and Appalachia in the early 2000s

    • Rx rates were 5x the national average

  • Oxy got the nickname Hillbilly Heroin because of the impact on these regions

  • Why Appalachia and Ohio Valley were especially vulnerable:

    • Isolated rural communities

    • Residents lived “hard lives” - limited work opportunities and challenging conditions 

    • Deindustrialization got rid of their primary industries of stable employment (mining, manufacturing)

    • Many residents relied on Medicaid and Medicare

    • Individuals saw opportunities to use prescription meds as a way to boost their income

      • Either using to cope with their living conditions, or selling to improve them

  • Therefore, the Opioid crisis is deeply connected to (maybe even caused by) broader economic shifts @ the time like deindustrialization, growing inequality, and the breakdown of social safety nets

  • Despite the crisis showing in the early 2000s, action was delayed for years

    • Led to questions about regulatory failure and the influence of big pharma lobbying

A Commercial Triumph

  • Oxy had crazy financial success:

    • Sales went from $48 million in 1996 —> $1.1 billion in 2000

  • The reason behind the financial success isn’t because the medication is genuinely a therapeutic miracle, but rather it’s a product of effective marketing

    • Direct to consumer (DTC) advertising - paying doctors to take tripe to symposiums hyping up the drug

    • Sales reps denounced the potential harms when marketing to clinicians (e.g. “legitimate pain patients can’t get addicted”)

    • Invented the concept of “pseudo addiction” (that patients that are seeking more medication aren’t addicted, but rather they need higher doses for their pain)

    • Used data mining to locate the physicians most willing to prescribe, and paid them more attention

Case Study: UofT

  • Analyzed the influence of pharmaceutical marketing on medical education

    • Showed the extent to which pharmaceutical marketing could spread false info to promote their addictive products

  • From 2004-2010, 1,400 med students took a mandatory course on pain management

    • During the course, they were explicitly told that oxy was the best available pain medicine specifically because it was “non-addictive”

      • Lecturer falsely said it was a “weak opioid”

    • Course textbook including this info was free, perhaps funded by the pharma companies

  • This teaching at U of T contributed to a generation of physicians predisposed to prescribe Oxy liberally

  • Later on, the university responded to this in a way of “Oops! Please forget what you learned”

Beyond OxyContin - A Persistent and Increasing Opioid Epidemic

  • Devastating impact of oxy led to lawsuits by municipalities, states, provinces…

    • Claims running up to billions of dollars

  • Oxy was removed from the Canadian market in 2012, replaced with OxyNeo

    • OxyN is claimed to be abuse resistant, however it has the same addictive ingredient…

  • Prescription practices have been tightened, however it created a new problem, faced by those who were already hooked from their prescription oxy before

    • Addicts then turned to cheaper and more readily available street drugs

    • Increased use of heroin and fent

  • Opioid problem has grown more severe

    • 2016: BC declared it’s 1st ever public health emergency, opioid overdoses

      • Led to decriminalization of possession in 2023 - similar to the Portugal model

    • Similar stories have emerged on the prescription-drugs-to-illegal-drug pipeline

      • Benzodiazepines (anti-anxiety meds) often leading to opioid use (heroin, fent)

      • Stimulants (often for ADHD) often leading to meth use

Mass Addiction and Business

  • Business driven addictions can feed off and reinforce once another

  • E.g. Coffee

    • Most valuable global commodity after oil

    • Coffee addictions fuel the industry, which then provides products to duel the addiction more readily

    • So some might say there is a worldwide caffeine dependency

  • Leads to a troubling question: Is addiction being treated with addiction?

    • People can rely on coffee to counteract fatigue from not enough sleep —> coffee makes it harder to sleep, fueling that reliance

  • Societies tend to normalize and celebrate these dependencies

    • Think: Kay Chung, the dental student @ UCLA heralded for her hours long cramming sessions fueled by caffeine

    • Another e.g. Include professional online gamers, who will spend entire days sat and playing a game

  • The fact that we don’t seriously question widespread caffeine addiction is an example that shows how selective our understanding and concern about addiction can be

Conclusions

  • Everyday addictions challenge disease models through the concept of pathological learning

  • Limbic capitalism is a business model blamed for the proliferation of addiction

  • Widespread efforts are done by addiction model businesses to obfuscate the addiction potential of their products

  • Greater understanding of neuroscience has facilitated deeper, more profound addiction, but regulation on the use of this knowledge is slow and reluctant

Week 11

O’Malley and Valverde - “Pleasure, Freedom, and Drugs: The Uses of ‘Pleasure’ in Liberal Governance of Drug and Alcohol Consumption

  • There is a tendency of governments to identify the pleasures of the lower classes and the poor as “problematic” to good order

  • However, what about activities, that seem to be for the pursuit of pleasure, that aren’t pleasurable @ all?

  • The rhetoric behind “problematic” pleasure-seeking activities often refutes the notion that seeking enjoyment is a valid motive behind doing something

    • E.g. Governmental discourses on alcohol remain silent on pleasure as a motive for consumption

      • Often said that substance use is due to “slavery of the will”, “loss of reason”, and “bodily craving”

  • Even progressive sources focused on harm reduction exclude the pleasure as a motive discussion

    • Australia’s Royal Commission of Inquiry Into Drugs - establishes foundations for harm reduction in the country

      • “Man has used drugs over the centuries to alter the function of the body, to cure sickness, or for religious/cultural reasons”

      • Contemporary drug use is seen as the effect of “experimentation, peer pressure, family influences, availability, advertising, religion…”

      • but what about pleasure? enjoyment?? excitement???

  • This is not to say there’s never a discussion on pleasure seeking in substance use, it’s just very common

    • Even in more positive discourse of civilized enjoyment of substances, pleasure is dependent on moderation

      • E.g. End of prohibition brought the rise of civilized enjoyment of alcohol through regulated consumption

  • Once consumption is deemed problematic, so is its enjoyment

    • E.g. Seagrams (leading spirits manufacturer in NA) promoted moderate use of whisky, lessening it’s poor reputation linked to saloons

      • Owner Sam Bronfman said “We who make whiskey say ‘Drink Moderately’”

  • Pleasure is only present and accepted when the substance used to seek pleasure is done so “responsibly”

    • When “necessities” have been looked after

    • When “luxuries” can be afforded

    • “Whiskey cannot take the place of milk, bread, or meat. The pleasure which good whiskey offers is definitely a luxury." We don’t want a dollar that should be spend on the necessities of life.”

  • Goal of this article: To explain the ways in which discourses of pleasure as a valid motive for action are increasingly suppressed the more problematic that action appears

    • Focused on the discourses surrounding drugs and alcohol

    • Analyses these common affinities:

      • Good order + freedom + pleasure

      • Disorder + compulsion + pain

  • Argument: The way we link pleasure, drugs, and freedom are linked to how liberal governments define freedom, and how they govern their “free” people

  • Liberal political philosophy has a complicated relationship with pleasure

    • It needs pleasure

    • But pleasure creates problems

  • Why liberal philosophy needs pleasure

    • They assume people are rational calculators that weigh pleasure against pain when making decisions

    • Felicity calculus = The pleasure/pain calculator

    • Idea: rational people naturally choose things that bring pleasure > pain

  • The problem with pleasure:

    • Hedonism = The excessive pursuit of pleasure and self-indulgence

    • There is a perceived risk of hedonism —> irresponsibility, irrationality, dependence on pleasure inducing things

    • Hedonism conflicts with liberalism’s core values of responsibility, independence, and self-control

  • The liberal government’s strategy on controlling pleasure - governing @ a distance

    • Framing the behaviours they want their people to do as “pleasant” or rewarding, which affects their felicity calculus

    • Staying silent about any pleasure involved on behaviours they don’t want their people to do 

  • Liberalism and freedom are dynamic concepts that have changed drastically over time

    • 1800s: freedom was having a job, working hard, and saving money

      • Productive work and thrift were seen as pleasurable activities people had the freedom to do

      • Government was more hands on: providing social welfare and support so that everyone could have a jo and purchase necessities

    • late 1900s - today: Neoliberalism. Freedom is being an active consumer who makes choices in the marketplace

      • Working on personal fulfillment and curating your lifestyle through consumption are seen as pleasurable things we have the freedom to do

      • Government is more hands off, allowing free market to make choices based on their and the consumer’s desires 

Labour, Rationality and Freedom: The Spectre of Beastliness

  • In 18th century Britain, not all alcohol was viewed in the same way

    • Beer and ale = food

      • Necessary for a healthy, productive life

    • Spirits like gin = dangerous alcohol

      • Was heavily taxed by the government

  • This differing discourse on alcoholic drinks was captured by 2 Hogarth cartoons: “Beer Street” and “Gin Lane”

    • Beer St: beer drinking portrayed as pleasurable and associated with industry, jolliness, strength, and prosperity

      • People depicted as friendly and productive workers

    • Gin Lane: gin consumption associated with desperation, violence, destruction, and death

      • Mom drops her baby to death while intoxicated, whereas another feeds gin to her baby

      • No signs of productive work on Gin Lane, just gin sellers, pawnbrokers, and coffin makers

  • Hogarth’s illustrations suggested that gin users had reverted to a “beastly”, savage state

    • Abandoning human reason and becoming enslaved to bodily desires (mirrors past viewed characteristics of addicts)

  • Main takeaway: Pleasure was celebrated when drinking was connected to the virtues of what the sate believed in (labor, productivity, domestic responsibility), but there was no talk of pleasure associated with gin drinking (seen as undisciplined and dangerous), only “beastliness”

From Laissez-faire to Technocratic Freedom

  • Turn of 20th century: Even beer consumption was seen as problematic, because the new problem was how alcohol companies exploited people through unregulated free markets

  • 1830: Sidney and Beatrice Webb (social reformers) - criticized when traditional authorities lost their power to closely supervise pubs and deny licenses

    • This loss of authority was attributed to a laissez fare movement on markets

    • They though this created social and moral chaos

    • Called for a temperance movement to counteract it

  • 1882: Report by temperance activists calculated that “only 20% of alcohol consumption was necessary” 

    • Remaining 80% = “pure luxury” or “sheer waste”

  • 1899: Rowntree and Sitwell (researchers) argues that working class people couldn’t “afford” to drink since they already didn’t get enough nutrition and didn’t have money to spare

    • Focused on beer’s poor nutritional content

    • Called English drinking customs “wasteful” and “inefficient”

      • Resembles more recent discussions on drug use being explained as “influenced by cultural and religious customs” rather than pleasure

  • Rowntree and Sitwell introduce that problematic drinking —> “pleasure deficit”

    • Pleasure deficit = Lack of pleasure amongst working class drinkers experience

  • They also had 3 causes of excessive drinking, with “seeking pleasure” not being one of them:

    • Monotony and misery of working class life

    • Absence of healthy recreation opportunities

    • Brewers actively pushing their products

  • These approaches in this era influenced modern alcoholism research:

    • “ethanol intake” instead of “having a beer” or “drinking champagne”

      • This scientific language allows researchers to avoid discussion why people might actually want to drink

    • Introduced the concept of craving

      • Originally from Rowntree and Sitwell

      • Said it was because ill-nourished bodies craved the momentary stimulus alcohol provides

Craving and Addiction: The Science of Freedom and Pleasure during the Welfare State and Now

  • Early technocratic developments (developments improving government control of society by technical experts) set the stage for the “welfare state” in the 20th century

    • Liberal governments + sciences (psych, social work) created the “science of freedoms”

  • Science of freedoms = Field in which the psy-ences, criminology, and social work focused on improving the imperfect freedoms of free markets, and addressing inequalities

  • Criminology: Pleasure rarely appeared as an explanation for criminal behaviour

    • Any mention of pleasure was framed as “short term gratification”

    • Pleasure mentioned was also associated with negative, pathological terms

      • Hedonism, seduction

  • Government discourses on illegal drug use also silenced the possibility of pleasure

    • Emphasized abuse and addiction

    • Associated drug use with compulsion, misery, death, disease

    • The model of addiction described use as a loss of individual freedom

  • Later on, scientists have replaced “compulsion” with “craving”

    • Might seem related to pleasure, but it’s actually defined negatively

    • “Recurrent and persistent thoughts of [substance], the inability of the individual to resist these thoughts, the compulsive derive to consume [substance] and the loss of control over that drive”

    • Makes craving seem like it’s unpleasurable by turning it into an object of study

      • Make “craving calculations” based on questionnaires

  • Some researchers prefer “urges” instead of “cravings” because it covers more degrees of desire and can be positive or negative

    • Comes closer to acknowledging pleasure, but still doesn’t explicitly discuss it

  • There is some hint now of pleasure being discussed, especially when comparing discussions of alcoholism to discussions of OCD

    • “unlike someone with OCD who sees their urge to harm their kid as senseless, alcoholics are less likely to view their urge to drink as senseless , more like a need to be satisfied”

    • This shows that the societal embrace of drinking blurs the boundary between healthy enjoyment and compulsive use

      • Strictly teaches that harming children (even thinking about it) is wrong

      • But in the same breath, only heavy/destructive drinking is stigmatized

    • This is an example of how society and government no longer sees drinking as problematic as it now includes pleasure as motive to drink

Harm Minimization: Pleasure and Freedom of Choice

  • Foundational assumptions on harm reduction:

    • Drug use is governable through choice, even for those who are dependent

    • Reframes “addiction” and “abuse” as “drug users” who are consumers capable of making rational choice that choose disadvantageous options

    • Harm results from interactions between the substance + individual + environment

      • Not just from the user or the drug

  • Normalizing factor of harm reduction avoids demonizing users

    • Demonizing was seen as increasing risks by socially isolating addicts and blocking their access to treatment

  • Rise of harm reduction approaches to drug policy often contradict the argument of governments silencing pleasure, however this is not the case

    • Advice to users focuses on risk and harms

    • No discussion on why consumers want to use drugs (i.e. PLEASURE!!)

      • Australia’s National Campaign Against Drug Abuse classified use as being “unsanctioned” ,“hazardous”, “dysfunctional”, “responsible”… what about “pleasurable”??

    • Suggests that people use drugs because they are coerced by things like “peer pressure” or “advertising pressure”

  • Why does harm reduction (which assumes rational users) still remain silent about pleasure?

    • Pleasure might be encoded as risky in modern public health discourses

      • Think: “safe sex” campaigns fail to acknowledge that sex can be pleasurable and a legitimate reason why people have it

    • This silence might be an “engineering choice” meant to shape the felicity calculus to produce preferred outcomes

      • Mentioning the pleasures of drug consumption might tip the scale in favor of drug use for individuals (which is an unwanted outcome for the government)

Neoliberal Freedom and Calculating Hedonism

  • “Lifestyle” and “choice” became new ways in exercising freedom in neoliberal societies

    • People see themselves as sovereign consumers (they exercise freedom through picking how to live, what to buy, and what kind of person to be)

  • Nikolas Rose (sociologist): Argues that these new forms of freedom work by encouraging people to commit to certain lifestyles and values through their personal choices and the things they consume

  • Criticism of neoliberal freedom: Consumer culture pretends that pleasure an impulse are the most “real” ways to live

    • Pleasure is a big part of consumer freedom, but people can still exert self-control and planning (nobody just buys everything on a whim to seek pleasure)

    • Called “calculating hedonism” by Mike Featherstone

      • Pretty much modern day felicity calculus

      • Replaced “necessity” and “efficiency” (requirements for consuming certain products in the 1800s) with “fulfillment” and “demand” (as the free market wasn’t truly free in the welfare state, only in this day and age)

  • Pleasure has become more important and available as a governing category

    • Things like alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, are now all seen as producers of pleasure, and they are also governmentally regulated

  • However, neoliberal governments still don’t include pleasure in harm minimization policies

  • Why is this?

    • “new prudentialism” = Era in which individuals exercise freedom by taking personal responsibility for their own safety

      • Individuals are more personally responsible for governing their harm, as harm reduction strategies are readily available

      • E.g. Keeping a free Narcan kit when going to a rave in case you get laced, you feel more personally responsible for keeping yourself safe 

Conclusions

  • Pleasure can be understood as both a core component of liberalism and its conception of freedom (as shown in the felicity calculus), and also as a variable technique that governments use for governing free individuals.

  • Governments use discourses of pleasure in a selective and directional fashion, strategically deploying them to shape people's behavior.

  • What's happening goes beyond just the Enlightenment-era fear of the body and physical desire.

  • In liberal governance, especially after the 18th century, "pleasure" is deployed as a deliberate tactic or strategy by governments.

  • At the most general level, pleasure is only deployed "within reason"—meaning it's only associated with rational, acceptable behavior.

  • When drug or alcohol use is seen as problematic, it's described in ways that deny pleasure: the addict is driven by chemical dependency (not pleasure), the alcoholic by cravings (not pleasure), the "lager lout" by modern-day beastliness (not pleasure), and the working-class drinker by a pathological pleasure deficit in their lives (not pleasure).

  • Each of these pleasure-silencing discourses emerged and became dominant during particular periods of liberal history, but they rarely disappear completely once they've been invented.

  • Instead, these discourses remain as pervasive cultural narratives that are still available to be used whenever governments need to govern drug consumption.

  • Liberal government has accumulated a whole battery of pleasure-denying characterizations over the past two centuries, and each one has its own persuasive power.

  • Each pleasure-denying discourse is linked with specific governing techniques that seem appropriate for that characterization.

  • "Beastliness" requires and justifies the use of force and compulsion to control people.

  • "Dependency" and "addiction" valorize and mobilize medical interventions as the appropriate response.

  • "Compulsive behaviors" trigger and validate therapeutic treatments for individuals.

  • "Free choice consumers" require and are provided with information and skills training to make better decisions.

  • Through accumulating all these different approaches, liberalism has armed itself with multiple ways to respond to drug consumption issues.

  • This multiplicity of approaches makes liberalism increasingly flexible and adaptable in its capacity to govern drug use without ever having to acknowledge pleasure as a legitimate motivation.

  • However, there are important exceptions that prove the rule: moderate middle-class wine lovers, the cocktail set, and the quiet person having a drink alone in a rural pub can all legitimately be aligned with pleasure.

  • These acceptable drinkers are seen as engaging in "the quiet enjoyment of their property," which is associated with responsibility, moderation, and respectability.

  • The overall pattern is clear: pleasure is mobilized by liberal government as a discursive tactic—a strategic tool for influencing behavior.

  • In governmental discourse, pleasure is understood as Good, and therefore it can only legitimately be assigned to behaviors and activities that the government considers Good.

  • When consumption becomes problematic for liberal governance—by threatening values like productivity, responsibility, rationality, or public order—pleasure is systematically silenced or transformed into pathology.

  • This strategic silence about pleasure is integral to how liberal governments attempt to "govern at a distance."

  • By manipulating how activities are framed and understood (as pleasurable or not), governments can shape citizens' choices and behaviors without using direct coercion or force.

Lecture 9 - Drugs and the Modern World

Drugs are ‘Back’ - Why?

  • Over the last few centuries, society has developed a range of reasons to discourage drug use:

    • Concept of addiction

    • Negative cultural perceptions

    • Legal barriers

    • Medical warnings

    • Acknowledgement of addiction harming users

  • Even with these discouragements, drugs are widely used and their interest grows

  • This persistent appeal raises questions on what motivates continued drug use despite such obstacles

    • If society, cultures, your doctor, your family and friends all discourage you from doing drugs, why do you still do it??

The Value of Drugs

  • Drugs hold value for individuals:

    • Eases pain

    • Relieves stress

    • Can improve physical and social experiences

  • People often use drugs as a rational choice to solve problems or feel better

  • To understand addiction and respond effectively, we need to understand the purpose drugs serve to individuals and communities (not the pressures that influence people from taking them)

    • Perhaps people don’t feel “forced” to take drugs - which is a negative circumstance

    • Maybe there are rational, less negative reasons on why people consume them

Drugs as Pleasure

  • Much of the conversation about drugs focuses on addiction as a compulsion/illness

    • Ignores the fact that many users are motivated by pleasure (think about the reading Pleasure, Freedom, and Drugs)

  • Research shows that lots of people use highly addictive substances just for enjoyment, not compulsion

  • When society overlooks pleasure and exaggerates addiction, it can lead to:

    • Unnecessary stigma

    • Harsh policies

    • Mistreatment of users (paternalism, brutality)

Drugs and Self-Management

  • In today’s world (neoliberalism) people are expected to manage their own pain and suffering

    • Instead of relying on social support

  • Consumer culture encourages us to find solutions to discomfort

    • Oftentimes this means reaching for drugs and other products

  • Psychoactives, for example, allow people to personally cope with the pressures and routines of everyday life

    • This enables them to fulfill neoliberal expectations like more consumption, self-reliance, and competition in the market

  • E.g. “Ketamine therapy” rather than seeking traditional (and a lot of times insurance covered) talk therapy

Caffeine and Modernity

  • Caffeine plays a big role in modern society by boosting alertness and productivity

    • It allows people to fulfill society’s expectations for them: working harder, keeping accidents at bay

  • Widespread use highlights how modern culture depends on stimulation and constant activity, with other stimulants (i.e. cocaine, adder-all) offering similar effects

Drugs and Personal Enhancement

  • People today also use drugs as tools for self improvement

    • To think better (adder-all and Ritalin, psychedelics)

    • To look stronger (anabolic steroids)

    • To enhance sexual experiences (honey packs, viagra)

  • Influenced by the push for personal achievement which is perpetuated in today’s society

    • Think hustle culture, bodybuilders and fitness influencers

  • The boundary between treating illness and pursuing enhancement is blurry, and society judges some uses as sensible and others as irrational

Psychedelic Renaissance

  • There is a revival of interest in psychedelics in the 21st century

    • Increase attention for their possible therapeutic uses (DMT psychedelic assisted therapy), investment opportunities (legalizing the sale of mushrooms), and tourism (ayahuasca retreats)

  • Many pursue psychedelics with the following purposes:

    • Gaining personal insight

    • Reconnecting with nature

    • Seeking personal experiences

  • Some people can see psychedelic use as almost a remedy for the emptiness/loss of meaning in modern life

Addiction as Value?

  • While addiction is usually portrayed negatively, some thinkers argue it can create a sense of order/purpose for people whose lives lack structure

  • Addiction can be a way to find meaning, routine, or social bonds

    • This can take the place of traditional roles or careers

    • Related to Alexander’s adaptation theory of addiction

      • The psychological/social distress: loss of meaning/routine/social bonds due to no job or role

      • Adaptation: Addiction

Drugs as Social Ceremony

  • Beyond individual benefits, drugs have social value

  • Coffee and tea rituals - mark time and foster social connection

    • Coffeehouses bring people together and promote hospitality

  • Cocaine and alcohol - sense of togetherness and can symbolize unity

Drugs as Communicative

  • Drug consumption serves as a social signal

    • Helping people express gender, class, and group belonging

  • Choices about what to drink or smoke, and how to do it, can communicate aspects of one’s identity or social standing to others

    • Think - smoking a joint vs. smoking a cigarette have two different connotations (personally I think smoking a cig is chic, even though I smoke joints)

Addiction as a Social Necessity?

  • Some addictions (ie internet use) may be essential for functioning in society

    • Provides connection and safety 

  • These addictions are more culturally accepted, which makes people question if they’re really addictions at all

    • Some might say excessive internet use is a collective dependence, which removes the individualization that is characteristic of addiction

Conclusions

  • Drug use continues because drugs and addictive behaviours provide real value to people

  • These values can be social (fostering connection, communicating, unity), personal (self-management, pleasure, self-improvement, adaptation theory), or tied to contemporary lifestyles (stimulants and boosting productivity and stimulation)

  • To truly address addiction, we need to understand the benefits it gives people, as well as the benefits of using in general

  • Ignoring the benefits of drugs and addiction can explain why moralistic and medical approaches fail to solve addiction problems

Week 6

  • The War on Drugs (WoD) is a racially biased system that criminalizes urban minorities while protecting white middle-class youth, serving as a form of social control akin to the "New Jim Crow."

  • Nixon's declaration of the WoD explicitly targeted anti-war protestors and Black Americans, using exaggerated dangers of drugs to disrupt these communities.

  • The persistence of the WoD is attributed to its effectiveness as a method of racialized social control and its role in expanding the carceral system.

Week 8

  • "Phantasmal commodities" are substances legally and socially constructed as "drugs," imbued with myths and symbolic power, rather than being defined by pharmacology.

  • Drug prohibition, often an extension of colonial practices, enforces social hierarchies through "law-making violence" and "limpieza" (purifying violence), as seen in Plan Colombia.

  • The U.S. model of the WoD (supply reduction, abstinence) has been exported globally through international law and neoliberal policies, exacerbating violence and poverty in countries like Colombia and Mexico.

Week 9

  • Addiction should be understood as a hybrid concept, integrating both biological and social explanations, rather than being viewed purely through either lens.

  • "Civilizing technologies" are therapeutic interventions that regulate behavior, used to produce "better citizens" by addressing behavioral compulsions.

  • The expansion of the addiction concept to include behavioral compulsions (e.g., gambling, sex, social media) has been influenced by scientific developments (like the dopamine hypothesis) and the "Anonymous Model" (AA), often reflecting societal anxieties and blurring the line between moral judgment and clinical diagnosis.

Week 10

  • The "attention economy" of social media companies relies on intentionally designing platforms to be addictive through features like the slot machine effect, social validation, and the erosion of natural stopping cues.

  • These addictive designs raise significant ethical concerns regarding harm (to dignity and autonomy), "adding insult to injury" (adaptive algorithms using users' data against them), and exploitation (taking advantage of vulnerabilities).

  • "Limbic capitalism" describes a business model where companies (e.g., social media, tobacco, pharma) exploit universal human susceptibility to addiction for commercial profit, often engaging in corporate obfuscation and requiring strong regulatory intervention.

Week 11

  • Liberal governments strategically suppress or transform the discourse of "pleasure" as a motive for drug and alcohol consumption, particularly when the behavior is deemed problematic.

  • This "pleasure-silencing" is a deliberate tactic to shape citizen behavior and maintain social order, influencing their "felicity calculus" (pleasure/pain calculations).

  • Despite governmental efforts to deny pleasure, drug use persists because substances and addictive behaviors offer real "value" to individuals and communities, including pain relief, social enhancement, self-management, and personal enhancement, which effective addiction strategies must acknowledge.