The Age of Addiction
How Bad Habits Became Big Business
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Narrated by:
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Qarie Marshall
About this listen
We live in an age of addiction, from compulsive gaming and shopping to binge eating and opioid abuse. Sugar can be as habit-forming as cocaine, researchers tell us, and social media apps are hooking our kids. But what can we do to resist temptations that insidiously and deliberately rewire our brains? Nothing, David Courtwright says, unless we understand the history and character of the global enterprises that create and cater to our bad habits.
The Age of Addiction chronicles the triumph of “limbic capitalism”, the growing network of competitive businesses targeting the brain pathways responsible for feeling, motivation, and long-term memory. We see its success in Steve Wynn’s groundbreaking casinos and Purdue Pharma’s pain pills, in McDonald’s engineered burgers and Tencent video games from China. All capitalize on the ancient quest to discover, cultivate, and refine new and habituating pleasures.
Courtwright holds out hope that limbic capitalism can be contained by organized opposition from across the political spectrum. Progressives, nationalists, and traditionalists have worked together against the purveyors of addiction before. They could do it again.
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The most popular drug in America is a white powder. No, not that powder. This is caffeine in its most essential state. And Caffeinated reveals the little-known truth about this addictive, largely unregulated drug found in coffee, energy drinks, teas, colas, chocolate, and even pain relievers. Drawing on the latest research, Caffeinated brings us the inside perspective at the additive that Salt Sugar Fat overlooked.
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Caffeine in all its myriad presentations
- By Bonny on 04-12-14
By: Murray Carpenter
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Empire of Things
- How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
- By: Frank Trentmann
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 33 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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What we consume has become the defining feature of our lives: our economies live or die by spending, we are treated more as consumers than workers and even public services are presented to us as products in a supermarket. In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British Empire to the present.
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An exhaustive attempt to get the story right
- By John on 03-09-16
By: Frank Trentmann
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Flowers in the Blood
- The Story of Opium
- By: Jeff Goldberg, Dean Latimer, William Burroughs - introduction
- Narrated by: Stephen McLaughlin
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Opium has played a dramatic and varied role in human history, inspiring religious veneration, scientific exploration, the bitterest rancor, and the most fanciful ecstasy. Now, authors Jeff Goldberg and Dean Latimer have provided a complete, insightful history of opium. Flowers in the Blood lifts the veil of mystery that has surrounded opium down through the ages.
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OPIATE DECRIMINALIZATION
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 06-18-14
By: Jeff Goldberg, and others
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Uncommon Grounds
- The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World
- By: Mark Pendergrast
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 16 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in ancient Abyssinia to the advent of Starbucks. In this updated edition of the classic work, Mark Pendergrast reviews the dramatic changes in coffee culture over the past decade, from the disastrous "Coffee Crisis" that caused global prices to plummet to the rise of the Fair Trade movement and the "third-wave" of quality-obsessed coffee connoisseurs.
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Décent overarching review of coffee history digressing into its American commercialization
- By seajaywood on 05-23-19
By: Mark Pendergrast
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This is Your Country on Drugs
- The Secret History of Getting High in America
- By: Ryan Grim
- Narrated by: Milton Bagby
- Length: 10 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Past antidrug campaigns actually encouraged drug use. A few years ago, America stopped dropping acid altogether. The meth epidemic peaked a long, long time ago. NAFTA opened the border and created a bonanza for cocaine and meth traffickers just as President Clinton knew it would. President Reagan may have inadvertently caused the crack epidemic. Kids today are doing fewer illegal drugs than kids from any time in the recent past, and for a surprising reason.
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A good book but....
- By steve on 10-28-10
By: Ryan Grim
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Opium
- A History
- By: Martin Booth
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 13 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Known to mankind since prehistoric times, opium is arguably the oldest and most widely used narcotic. Opium: A History traces the drug's astounding impact on world culture - from its religious use by prehistoric peoples to its influence on the imaginations of the Romantic writers; from the earliest medical science to the Sino-British opium wars.
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GREAT SUMMARY, WELL READ
- By Aidan on 01-21-20
By: Martin Booth
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A Brief History of Vice
- How Bad Behavior Built Civilization
- By: Robert Evans
- Narrated by: Tristan Morris
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Guns, germs, and steel might have transformed us from hunter-gatherers into modern man, but booze, sex, trash talk, and tripping built our civilization. Cracked editor Robert Evans brings his signature dogged research and lively insight to uncover the many and magnificent ways vice has influenced history, from the prostitute-turned-empress who scored a major victory for women's rights to the beer that helped create - and destroy - South America's first empire.
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Funny and somewhat informative
- By Neuron on 08-20-16
By: Robert Evans
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Socialism Sucks
- Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
- By: Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 4 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The bastard step-child of Milton Friedman and Anthony Bourdain, Socialism Sucks is a bar crawl through former, current, and wannabe socialist countries around the world. Free-market economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel to countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and Sweden to investigate the dangers and idiocies of socialism - while drinking a lot of beer.
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I learned more than I anticipated in a 4 + hr book
- By J D Rossi on 08-06-19
By: Robert Lawson, and others
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Smoke Signals
- A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational, and Scientific
- By: Martin A. Lee
- Narrated by: Nick Podehl
- Length: 21 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Martin A. Lee traces the dramatic social history of marijuana, from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased. Lee describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a dynamic, multibillion-dollar industry. Colorful, illuminating, and at times irreverent, this is a fascinating listen for recreational users and patients, students and doctors, musicians and accountants, Baby Boomers and their kids, and anyone who has ever wondered about the secret life of this ubiquitous herb.
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A hard book for me to rate
- By Blake on 05-08-13
By: Martin A. Lee
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Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
- By: Anne Case, Angus Deaton
- Narrated by: Kate Harper
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Life expectancy in the United States has recently fallen for three years in a row - a reversal not seen since 1918 or in any other wealthy nation in modern times. In the past two decades, deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism have risen dramatically, and now claim hundreds of thousands of American lives each year - and they're still rising. Case and Deaton, known for first sounding the alarm about deaths of despair, explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class.
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So many words, so little insight
- By Trebla on 03-22-20
By: Anne Case, and others
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Sweetness and Power
- The Place of Sugar in Modern History
- By: Sidney W. Mintz
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this eye-opening study, Sidney W. Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar and reveals how closely interwoven sugar's origins are as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies, with its use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat.
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Dated but still worthwhile
- By Acteon on 11-14-19
By: Sidney W. Mintz
What listeners say about The Age of Addiction
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jai A. Evans
- 12-19-19
Good overview of historical causes of addiction.
A good overview of the causes and contibuation of addition and the economics of addiction promotion.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Fernando
- 05-06-23
Phenomenal
The story is a little rushed, but what Courtwright has to say is one of the most important stories we can talk about regarding human nature, capitalism and current global challenges. Knowing this information means being a much better prepared person in the 21st century, whatever your goals and duties.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Joe Moore
- 06-06-19
Warning: Liberal
You just had to get a dog in at Trump at the last minute, eh?
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9 people found this helpful
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- LK Mastermind
- 08-13-22
Boring narration
This is why most books should be read by their writers because they are passionate about the subject. The guy reading this book is as bore as I am listening to it. The writer made the subject sound interesting in an interview so I was interested, but he’s not doing the reading here.
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