Consumer and Social Well-Being

Addictive Consumption A woman in New Zealand apparently died from drinking too much Coca-Cola. Her family said she drank about 2.2 gallons of the beverage every day for years. Prior to her death she had several rotten teeth removed, and she gave birth to a baby who was born without any tooth enamel. The 31-year-old mother of eight died following a cardiac arrhythmia after consuming more than two pounds of sugar and 970 mg of caffeine a day. Coca-Cola noted that the coroner’s report, while singling out its product as a probable cause of death, stated that the company “cannot be held responsible for the health of consumers who drink unhealthy quantities of the product.”87 Though we usually equate substance abuse with addiction to alcohol, drugs, or nico-tine, it seems we can become dependent on almost anything—there is even a Chapstick Addicts support group with 250 active members!88 Consumer addiction is a physiologi-cal or psychological dependency on products or services. Many companies profit from sell-ing addictive products or from selling solutions for kicking a bad habit. A Chinese man got so upset about the amount of time his adult son spent playing videogames that he took a novel approach: He hired “digital hit men” in the form of other gamers to kill off all of his son’s characters in the games.89 How is that for “tough love?” Psychologists compare social media addiction to chemical dependency, to the point of inducing symptoms of withdrawal when users are deprived of their fix. As one noted, “Everyone is a potential addict—they’re just waiting for their drug of choice to come along, whether heroin, running, junk food or social media.”90 Indeed, a survey reported 1 in 3 smartphone owners would rather give up sex than their phones!91 And, as many of us realize this fixation grows by the “enablers” around us as they exhibit the same behav-ior. Indeed one study documented that college students are much more likely to pull out their phones when someone with whom they were sitting had just done so.92 Internet addiction has been a big headache for several years already in South Korea, where 90 percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband. Many young Koreans’ social lives revolve around the “PC bang,” dimly lit Internet parlors that sit on practically every street corner. A government study estimates that up to 30 percent of South Koreans younger than 18 are at risk of Internet addiction. Many already exhibit signs of actual addiction, including an inability to stop themselves from using computers, rising levels of tolerance that drive them to seek ever-longer sessions online, and with-drawal symptoms such as anger and craving when they can’t log on. Some users have literally dropped dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end.93 Other problems arise when people become overly involved in playing online games or posting on social network sites: ● In the United Kingdom, a 33-year-old widowed mother let her two dogs starve to death and neglected her three kids after becoming hooked on the online game Small World. A judge banned her from going on the Internet. The woman slept only two hours a night as she played the virtual reality game (in which dwarves and giants battle to conquer the world) almost nonstop for six months. Her children—aged 9, 10, and 13—had no hot food and “drank” cold baked beans from tins. When the family’s two dogs died from neglect, she left their bodies rotting in the dining room for two months.94 ● A U.S. woman pled guilty to a charge of second-degree murder in the death of her three-month-old son. The 22-year-old mother lost her temper when her child be-gan crying while she was playing FarmVille on Facebook; she shook the baby until it died.