University of North Florida | Presidential Professor Emeritus
Video
From The Age of Addiction: Manufacturers of addictive products have long sought to attract the young, glamorize suspect behavior, and soft-pedal risks. “If you want a Cigarette which will not injure your health in any way, smoke the ‘JUNIOR PARTNER.’ They have a corn shuck mouth-piece, which extracts the nicotine and the bad effects of the burning paper … [and] have no opium or flavorings in them; are hand made, and ¼ of an inch longer than any other Cigarette.” What doomed this mid-1880s brand was less its inventive promotion than the tidal wave of cheap, machine-made cigarettes that turned a marginal form of tobacco consumption into a mass addiction. Reformers counterattacked against cigarettes and other manufactured vices, including the opium that the manufacturer disavowed. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society.
How Businesses Get People Addicted
David Pakman interviews David Courtwright about limbic capitalism and digital addictions.
The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business
Addictions Old and New Conference, University of Richmond, October 23, 2015
Food addiction has emerged as an important field of research. This talk crtically assesses the concept and its bearing on the epidemic of obesity.
The Culture War and the Rise of Inequality
University of Kentucky, March 28, 2014
Presented at the Conference on Economic and Political Inequality, this illustrated lecture considers whether Culture War issues have become a political Trojan Horse for wealthy individuals and corporarations, as Thomas Frank has argued, or whether rising inequality is the product of more fundamental forces.
David Courtwright's address to the 35th Anniversary Conference for the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention, Washington, D.C., March 24, 2007 (Craig Gormus, videographer; introduction by Robert DuPont)
