#addiction book excerpt Limbic Capitalism

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“To this day, 80 percent of alcohol sales go to the 20 percent of customers who are the heaviest users, a pattern that applies across the business of brain reward. More than half of all marijuana finds its way into the lungs and stomachs of those who spend more than half their waking hours stoned. Insofar as addictions to marijuana, or to anything else, develop most often among the poor, the marginal and the genetically vulnerable, they are sources of inequality and injustice as well as illness.”

How ‘Limbic Capitalism’ Preys on Our Addicted Brains

May 31, 2019 

Excerpted with permission from The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business, by David T. Courtwright. Copyright ©2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. [[copyright addiction?]]

“I propose that the main source of the problem has been what I call limbic capitalism. This refers to a technologically advanced but socially regressive business system in which global industries, often with the help of complicit governments and criminal organizations, encourage excessive consumption and addiction. They do so by targeting the limbic system, the part of the brain responsible for feeling and for quick reaction, as distinct from dispassionate thinking. The limbic system’s pathways of networked neurons make possible pleasure, motivation, long-term memory and other emotionally linked functions crucial for survival. Paradoxically, these same neural circuits enable profits from activities that work against survival, businesses having turned evolution’s handiwork to their own ends.

Limbic capitalism was itself a product of cultural evolution. It was a late development in a long historical process that saw the accelerating spread of novel pleasures and their twinned companions of vice and addiction. The pleasures, vices and addictions most conspicuously associated with limbic capitalism were those of intoxication. Considerations of private profit and state revenue encouraged alcohol and drug consumption until rising social costs forced governments to restrict or prohibit at least some drugs.”

READ MORE https://quillette.com/2019/05/31/how-limbic-capitalism-preys-on-our-addicted-brains/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

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