The Power and Politics of Psychoactive Commerce

ABSTRACT

Even the traditional cigarette made something of a comeback, prompting one tobacco executive to observe that the pandemic's limits on social gatherings provided smokers more opportunities to indulge their habit without fear of social disapproval.1 That consumers can purchase such products from grocery stores and other retail outlets deemed too essential to shutter during a lockdown underscores the relatively privileged position of psychoactive commodities in the U.S. political economy. Courtwright thus uses the same analytical frame to evaluate markets for alcohol and cigarettes alongside markets for store-bought foods that entice consumers with their seductive blend of fat, sugar, and salt;video games and electronic slot machines that continually beckon users to play just one more round;and the social media apps that keep us tethered to our smartphones. The tobacco industry drew upon "a bottomless bag of marketing tricks," from engineering cigarettes to make them more addictive to flooding "low-tax markets with popular brands in expectation that they would be smuggled into high-tax markets and sold on the street or in shops and bars" (pp. 155–56). [...]the growth of informal economies, multinational industries, transnational criminal networks, and borderless trade" spread vices around the globe and made "their suppression increasingly futile" (p. 156).