Why addictions and compulsive behaviors are aggravated by consumer society

With the proliferation of epidemics, eco-anxiety, and geopolitical conflicts, addictions are taking on an unprecedented scale. The use of illicit substances such as cocaine and ecstasy/MDMA has doubled in France over the past ten years. In the United Kingdom, deaths directly caused by alcohol have increased by 30% since the Covid-19 pandemic.

" The precariousness caused by each economic crisis automatically increases the consumption of drugs and other psychoactive substances. Because, contrary to popular belief, addiction is not due to a lack of willpower or to the person concerned letting go," explains addiction specialist Jean-Victor Blanc, also co-founder of the Pop & Psy festival.

Author of Pop & Psy: Addicts. Taking Care of Yourself and Identifying Toxic Behaviors with Pop Culture (Points, 320 pages, 9.30 euros), published on October 3, the doctor invites us to " replace addiction in a social and systemic dynamic, in this case capitalistic, as analyzed by drug historian David T. Courtwright."

In his essay The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business (Harvard University Press, 2019), this American academic recalls how, thanks to industrialization and globalization, the ancestral consumption of plants with psychoactive effects has transformed into a "mass addiction" to cheap and easily accessible substances. According to him, we have entered the era of what he calls "limbic capitalism," the market economy based on the monetization of the frenetic activation of our reward system (dopamine), housed in the limbic system of our brain.

Under the influence of drug trafficking, which takes orders through social media and delivers by private hire vehicle, cocaine use is exploding, as is chemsex (sex under the influence of drugs). While alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis use is declining among younger people in France, their use of social media and video games is increasing. " Although, for the moment, international classifications do not describe this screen use as an addiction, it is nonetheless compulsive and associated with depression, anxiety, and unhappiness among younger people," notes Jean-Victor Blanc.

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