Profiting from addiction

The Guardian has an interesting and sad story about a movement in the UK to get coroners’ inquests to be be more truthful in regard to suicides caused by compulsive gambling:

Jo Holloway, who lives near Exeter, said she found the inquest process “ghastly” after the death of her son, Daniel Clinkscales, in October 2017. She provided evidence for the inquest on how her “charismatic, very popular, very bright” son, who worked as a regional sales manager, was spending most of his earnings on gambling.

“I gave them the evidence, but the coronial system was not interested,” she said. “I thought I was the only person who had lost someone who had taken their life because of gambling. I felt an absolute compulsion to know what had happened to him.”

The family say the coroner did say gambling was a contributing factor in the death, but it was not included on the death certificate and they felt there was not a proper investigation in the circumstances leading up to the death or a proper examination of his digital devices. Holloway said the inquest only lasted about 20 minutes and she was not permitted to give a personal statement about her son. It recorded a verdict of suicide.

Judith Bruney, whose son Chris died in April 2017, said that while his inquest highlighted the role of gambling, it did not investigate how he had been targeted by betting firms. “He didn’t want to gamble, but they wouldn’t leave him alone,” said Bruney. “There was no escape for him. We found all these emails and texts to keep him gambling. None of that was taken into consideration.”

I don’t know anything about the inquest system in the UK, but this touches on a broader issue, which is the businesses — gambling and alcohol are the most obvious — which depend on addictive behavior for almost all of their profit margin.

A few years ago a study in the US found that 70% of the population either never drinks or does so rarely. The 8th decile of the population (each decile is about 25 million adults) drank an average of about one drink per day. The 9th decile averaged two drinks. The 10th decile — again this is almost as many people as live in the state of New York — averaged 11 drinks per day.

Gambling features similar statistics, with similar social consequences.

Now of course the flip side of these statistics is that the vast majority of people who drink and gamble do so in ways that are not seriously harmful to them, and may well be quite beneficial on net. But there’s very little profit to be extracted in those people, so the “rational” thing to do is to try to turn them into addicts.

This is all part of limbic capitalism, which applies to many things other than drinking and gambling, and it’s being made a lot worse by information technology, which allows everyone to carry their addictions around in their pocket wherever they are at any time of day or night.