In a scathing new edition of Nora’s Blog, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Dr. Nora Volkow, unloads on the “commercial interests” pushing addictive substances and behaviors on the American people for private gain at society’s expense. 

Dr. Volkow tallies the staggering annual toll of corporations pushing addiction on highly targeted audiences:

• 678,000 Americans die annually due to “nutrition and obesity-related diseases”
• 480,000 Americans die annually as a result of tobacco use
• 178,000 Americans die annually from causes attributed to alcohol use

The costs of treating these million-plus Americans who die each year from legal substances are not borne by the alcohol industry, the tobacco industry, or the highly- processed food industry. Alcohol and tobacco companies do pay taxes that contribute to programs to treat people for alcohol and tobacco addiction, but nowhere close to the hundreds of billions of dollars in annual costs that Dr. Volkow estimates these two products are causing. To quote Dr. Volkow:

The success of these industries is maximized by their products being able to trigger compulsive consumption, including consumption that results in addiction.

Among the ways in which corporations are pushing addiction, Dr. Volkow cites the vaping industry, which has driven a whole new field of addiction by attentively designing products users find compulsive. While vaping is less harmful than smoking, it should still be prohibited to push a problematic substance, especially with marketing targeting kids.

Dr. Volkow also cites the recently-liberated cannabis industry, which is pushing the envelope of product design to hook new generations of young users. Dr. Volkow writes:

Cannabis products are often sold in colorful packages that mimic kid-friendly snack foods, for example, making them appealing to children and to young people. Adolescents exposed to cannabis marketing have greater odds of using the drug.

Dr. Volkow even takes on the tech giants, though she does not name any specific companies. She blames the companies for social media addiction, gaming addiction, and gambling addiction.

When it comes to what is being done to limit powerful corporations from pushing problematic substances and behavior, Dr. Volkow has few policy wins to offer:

• The Food and Drug Administration “has taken steps to restrict the sale and marketing of flavored vapes”

• The Surgeon General has issued an advisory on “the mental health impacts of social media”

• The National Academy of Sciences has found that cannabis companies “have prioritized economic outcomes over public health”

However, social media companies and gaming companies have been winning court cases that would have forced them to redesign their products to reduce the damaging problems they cause. One of those problems is glamorizing the use of addictive products through celebrity and influencer endorsements without financial disclosures. A 2018 study in Current Addiction Reports found that:

There is consistent evidence that adolescents and young adults are highly exposed to substance use portrayals [through social media] and that these portrayals are associated with subsequent substance use.

In his recent book, A New Approach to Addiction and Choice, Dr. Reinout W. Wiers

from the Addiction Development and Psychopathology Lab at the University of Amsterdam, notes that an effective disincentive for young people against the use of nicotine products has been making them aware of how corporations are trying to trick them into a lifetime of dependency. In that regard, Dr. Nora Volkow has done us all a service by calling attention to the corporations that profit from our problems.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published October 2, 2024.

Sources:

“Commercial interests contribute to drug use and addiction,” Nora’s Blog, National Institute on Drug Abuse, September 26, 2024.

“Media/Marketing Influences on Adolescent and Young Adult Substance Abuse,” Current Addiction Reports, April 2018.

A New Approach to Addiction and Choice, by Dr. Reinout W. Wiers, to be published by Routledge in 2025.

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