“THE DREAM BEGINS AS SOON AS YOU OPEN THE DOOR”
Advertising an Addictive Mind-Set
LONG BEFORE A GIRL OR A BOY PICKS UP A CIGARETTE OR A BEER, HE OR SHE has been primed by advertising to expect transformation via a product. From infancy on, we get a seductive and incessant message from ads—products are magical, can fulfill our dreams. “The dream begins as soon as you open the door,” says a car ad. Imagine if this were an ad for alcohol (“the dream begins as soon as you open the bottle”) or cigarettes (“the dream begins as soon as you open the pack”) or heroin (“the dream begins as soon as you put in the needle”). Perhaps we would understand what a dangerous message this is.
The landscape of advertising is often deliberately dreamlike, surreal. In an ad for bottled water, a businessman rides the rapids down an escalator, while the faceless masses ride up, paying no attention. A 1997 commercial for Levi jeans features a cowboy driving through the desert in a 1971 Impala filled with stuffed animals. He strolls into a seedy roadhouse with two plush dinosaurs. He hops on a bus. Cut to the bus stopping in New York, and a young woman disembarking—wearing Levi’s and holding one of the dinosaurs. The director of the commercial calls it “dream logic.” One could also call it “drug logic,” since it mimics the altered consciousness of a drug-induced state.
Food is often offered as a way to enter into a dreamworld (“Drift into a chocolate daydream,” says an ad for flavored coffee) and indeed into heaven itself. A yogurt ad claims that the product will “take you to paradise.” Another ad, featuring a luscious closeup of a bagel and cream cheese, says, “Find heaven where you least expect it.” And an ad for grapefruit juice features an “Actual photo of woman in nirvana.”
Women are especially encouraged to reach for food to find peace, an oasis in our hectic days. In an ad for cheese, a woman dreamily says, “Some people journey to distant mountains to replenish their creativity. I prefer a short trip to the dairy case.” And an ad for chocolate candy pictures a woman lying on a sofa, with a faraway look in her eyes and a Dove bar in her hands, and the tagline “Let the world pass you by.” None of this is coincidental, of course, since advertisers know that food is commonly used, especially by women, to escape from problems. Ads like these, deceptive to be sure but innocuous enough one at a time, cumulatively legitimize and normalize this unhealthy and risky use of food. They also inevitably lead to disappointment since no food will transport us to paradise (although chocolate comes close).
Other products are also offered to women as a way magically to transport ourselves into a state of bliss. “Intoxicate your senses,” says an ad for bath products, while other ads promise a soft drink to “refresh your body and soul,” a shampoo to “soothe the soul of your hair,” and an herbal tea to “satisfy the soul.” Now there is certainly nothing wrong with women being encouraged to relax in a nice hot bath. But there is something wrong with the promise that any product is going to soothe our souls.
No product promises entry into the dreamworld more often or more dangerously than alcohol. “Fairy tales can come true,” says a vermouth ad, which features the liquor in a glass slipper. An ad featuring an ice cream soda glass with a colorful straw in it and an ice cream scoop beside it announces “The Bailey’s Dream Shake.” Although most ads are misleading, it is one thing to promise fulfillment of dreams via a car or a perfume, quite another via a powerfully mind-altering drug, which is in fact used by many to escape from reality and responsibilities.
In addition to the literal promises of a dreamworld, alcohol ads often use the kind of verbal and visual puns that occur in dreams. “They were anxious to try that new white wine,” features a courtroom scene with the wine on trial. “Tossing back a little J&B,” pictures a fisherman throwing the letters J&B into a lake. Such surrealistic imagery is common. “Follow your own plans and dreams take on dimensions,” says an ad for scotch featuring a young man walking through a Daliesque landscape. A very strange photo of some people in an open field approaching a rock with a staircase inside has the tagline, “Welcome to the state of Courvoisier.” Beer commercials feature giant ants and talking penguins and frogs that chant the brand name. Such ads attract attention, especially the attention of young people, and they give the brands a certain cachet of newness, hipness, originality.
Countless ads offer alcohol as a route to paradise or paradise itself. “Paradise found,” says one. “Escape to the islands,” says another. “Now available in bottles,” says a wine cooler ad, featuring a palm tree leaning into a brilliant tropical sunset. “Your own special island” certainly seems to be recommending solitary drinking, a sure sign of trouble with alcohol. There is room for only one glass on the tray. This ad also features a magic bottle, which remains filled and unopened, even though the drink has been poured. An alcoholic’s paradise indeed. And yet also an alcoholic’s hell. Almost all alcoholics experience intense feelings of isolation, alienation, and loneliness. Most make the tragic mistake of believing that the alcohol alleviates these feelings rather than exacerbating them. The ads take that symptom and turn it around, just as the alcoholic does. You are not isolated and alone: You’re on your own special island.
In another version of paradise, this time in a beer commercial, three young men on a beach are watching three beautiful young women walk by. One of the young men holds up the beer can as if it were a remote control and “rewinds” the scene, causing the women to walk by again and again. On the most obvious level, of course, this commercial objectifies women and trivializes the dreams of young men. But it also powerfully reinforces the idea that alcohol is a magic potion that can make our dreams come true. And this has serious consequences. Heavy drinkers tend to believe that alcohol is a “magic elixir” that will enhance their pleasure, sexual performance, and social competence. Teenage alcohol abusers expect more positive effects from alcohol than do their nonabusing peers. Where do these expectations come from? At the least these ads reinforce them and perhaps even instill them in very young people. “Absolut Magic,” promises the vodka ad. This is Absolute Intention on the part of the alcohol advertisers, who know very well that their profits depend upon creating a new market of heavy drinkers.
Again and again we are told that products can give us energy, power, sex appeal, magnetism. “Get your hands on the newest source of energy,” says an ad for . . . gloves (which are emitting so much energy they seem radioactive). This ad is merely stupid. But ads with a similar message about addictive products are far more seriously misleading, because these products deplete our energy and rob us of power. You would never guess it from the advertising, however. “Alive with pleasure!” says a cigarette ad, which certainly beats “Dead with cancer!” as a slogan.
We are primed from birth to believe that magical products can make our lives extraordinary. A commercial for the breakfast drink Tang opens with a weary-looking kid who drinks a glass of Tang and suddenly finds himself in a wildly colorful kitchen with orangutans jumping on the counters. “Tang . . . it’s a kick in a glass,” says the voiceover. What a message this is to little children—this drink can transform you. How could they possibly tell the difference between this and the beer commercials? And if they do believe this, even on an unconscious level, how do they feel when they drink the drink and nothing happens? Does the disappointment set them up for something less innocuous than Tang? One way to look at drug use is as an attempt to bridge the gap between the constant hype and false promises of advertising and the inevitable disappointment that results when one seeks real gratification from products. At least drugs deliver the goods temporarily—they truly do alter our consciousness.
“A kick in a glass.” The very language of advertising to children is often drug language. A campaign called “Craving” advertises a sugary cereal by showing a cute little monster that, according to the advertisers, represents “every kid’s uncontrollable craving for sweet and crunchy Honeycomb.” An “uncontrollable craving” for anything is a symptom of addiction. An ad for Diet Coke featuring a young woman going wild on a balcony talks about the “heightened sense of reality” associated with the product. In recent years there has been an explosion of new brands of soft drinks called energy drinks or extreme beverages, which contain megadoses of caffeine and are sometimes laced with exotic additives such as ginseng and guarana berries. The “kick in the glass” is not always just advertising hyperbole, since these products really do contain drugs.
Jolt is advertised as “America’s most powerful cola” in a television commercial that features a kid with his eyes bulging out. Surge, a citrus soft drink with a blast of caffeine made by the Coca-Cola Company, uses the slogans “Feed the Rush” and “Fully Loaded Summer.” Krank20 says “Water with caffeine, lots of caffeine.” It is probably no coincidence that crank is the street nickname for methamphetamines. Another brand, XTC, advertised as “a carbonated slap in the face,” alludes to the illegal hallucinogenic “ecstasy.” Red Bull promises to “give you wings,” and GoGo says, “It’ll blow your mind.” Other brands are Hype, Boost, Guts, Zapped, and RC Edge “Maximum Power” cola. Coca-Cola and Pepsi alone spend over $500 million a year pushing their caffeinated liquid candy with increasingly powerful imagery (while the National Cancer Institute spends less than $1 million on programs encouraging people to eat more fruits and vegetables).
Very young children are enticed by these ads, some of which feature cartoon characters, such as a rhinoceros, a dinosaur, and a turtle. Heavily caffeinated Mountain Dew, the fastest-growing soft drink in the country, is more than twice as popular as other soft drinks among children younger than six. Its television commercials feature young people sky-diving, bungee-jumping, and engaged in other risky activities. A 1999 Mountain Dew commercial shows skateboarders racing across the roof of a New York skyscraper.
Surge, rush, loaded, blow your mind? The double meaning of these words certainly isn’t lost on children, nor is it unintended by advertisers. According to Michael Bainbridge, a brand identity consultant, “There’s sort of this need for sensory overload. People are looking for total stimulation in all walks of life, and beverages are one way to get that.” Tom Pirko, a beverage consultant, said “Teens are looking for a turn-on that doesn’t put them in jail. They want more stimulation.”
A turn-on that doesn’t put them in jail? How about Kentucky Hemp Beer, a brew made from hemp seed, that is advertised as “Undetectable to police dogs”? The ad sets the bottle of beer, which has a cartoon horse on the label, against a psychedelic background.
Where does this need for sensory overload and more and more stimulation come from, if not from being constantly overstimulated from birth? Advertising deliberately offers us escape into a colorful, exciting, endlessly passionate world—not only via the products being sold but via the very pace of advertising itself, the beat, the colors, the thrills. How can our real lives and real relationships not seem dull by comparison? It isn’t only the goods that tantalize us, it is this dreamworld.
But the dreamworld and all the images of magical transformation are not sufficient to influence us in and of themselves. They probably wouldn’t matter very much if they didn’t connect with the core belief of American culture—that we can re-create ourselves, transform ourselves, indeed we should. Advertising has reshaped this into a belief that we can do it all effortlessly if we just use the right products. The underlying assumption is that life should be easy and painless. We shouldn’t have to work too hard at our jobs or our relationships. We shouldn’t have to struggle to alter our moods or have a good time. This belief in instant transformation is at the heart of addiction. If I drink this, I’ll be sexier, wittier. If I smoke this, I’ll be calmer, more sophisticated. If I eat this, I’ll feel safe and comforted. This product, this substance, will change me, will change my life. And, in spite of all the evidence, this time it will be different.
Of course, to be susceptible to these messages, we must also believe that our lives need changing, that they are not at all okay the way they are. Both addictions and advertising offer us the promise of a much more exciting and glamorous and colorful life, instantly, via a substance or product. They offer us escape, not only from pain but also from boredom and the horror of being ordinary in a culture that equates that with failure. Advertising for many products, not just addictive ones, often reinforces and normalizes the addict’s belief that life is dull and unpleasant and needs to be escaped. As the campaign for the television channel Showtime says, “Sometimes being somewhere else is the best place to be.”
Adulthood and responsibility are often equated in ads with boredom and terrifying ordinariness. “Oh no, you’re becoming your parents,” says an ad for a minivan. “Before the spouse, the house, the kids, you get one chance,” declares another car ad, which continues, “There’s something you should do before life hits you in the knees with ten bags of groceries and the need for a garden hose.” “Postpone adulthood,” says yet another car commercial.
Living fully in the present is one of the keys to a happy life (as well as to successful recovery from addiction). However, in the dreamworld of advertising, living in the present means that we can put down our burdens, our responsibilities, and become children again—usually spoiled, narcissistic children used to instant gratification, endless recess, no restraints. An ad featuring a hot red sportscar says, “Why wait to enjoy your second childhood when you can still enjoy your first?” Another features a sedan in the midst of a playground and the copy, “The need for recess hasn’t changed. Just the toys.” Yet another car ad says, “Not since you lived with Mom and Dad have you gotten so much for so little.” And a Jeep ad, drawing a direct connection between driving the Jeep and swinging in a tire swing, promises “to make your off-road dreams a reality.” We never have to grow up. We can drive these cars right to never-never-land.
According to child psychiatrist and author Robert Coles, America has entered a second adolescence with the following characteristics: grandiosity and a sense of invulnerability, heightened self-absorption, ironic detachment and defensiveness, and a preoccupation with appearance and sex. Media critic Steven Stark adds “defiant, oppositional anger” to the list. Most of these are characteristics of addiction as well, and many addicts in recovery feel that their addictions “froze” them in adolescence and that they must now grow up for the first time.
There is clearly nothing desirable in the world of advertising about growing up. An ad for a truck says, “About the only thing it has in common with the typical 50-year-old is the spare tire.” Fifty is still young these days. Most of us at fifty are much wiser than we were at thirty and we still have another twenty-five or thirty years to go. But we get the constant message that it is all over for us. This is demoralizing for all of us, men and women, young and old—we learn to dread the natural process of growing older and we feel terribly devalued as we age.
Again and again advertising depicts adulthood as a drag, our real lives as monotonous, gray, our relationships as boring and obligatory, our jobs meaningless. According to an alcohol ad, the “perfect week” is “Saturday, Sunday, Saturday, Sunday, Saturday, Sunday, Holiday.” Advertising presumes that our work, although often stressful, is basically tedious. How are children to learn about the joys and rewards that can result from responsibility and commitment and hard work?
As one ad says, “We go from our safe little dwelling areas to our climate controlled office cubicle thingys where we spend our days staring at computers and talking to each other in the binary language of ones and zeroes. No wonder we’re all going nuts.” The solution? “We need the sun and the wind and the smell of trees and flowers.” It certainly seems true that one of the reasons we’re going nuts is that we’re so disconnected from nature and the natural. This ad, however, is selling us a car—the chief destroyer of our natural environment. There is a denial going on in this ad that mirrors the denial of addiction.
Reality is boring, the ads tell us, so we should escape whenever we can and always seek instant gratification. A commercial for Pepsi’s new drink Josta features a grandfather telling his grandson that when he was his age his peers encouraged him to chase women, stay out all night, and party. He then says he resisted the impulse—and has been sorry ever since. Josta’s slogan is “Better do the good stuff now.” So, children get the message early on that it is better to do the good stuff now and, furthermore, that the “good stuff” is to chase women, stay out all night, and party. How ready they are then for a campaign such as Beefeater gin’s “Live a little,” which features young people partying hard to ward off dread of a dismal future. “Imagine dying without ever having said, ‘shaken, not stirred,’” says one ad in this campaign, featuring a beautiful young woman at a bar. On the other hand, imagine dying without ever having gotten so drunk that you throw up on your shoes or sleep with someone you despise or wrap your car around a tree.
Again and again ads promise that alcohol will help us break the chains of ordinary life and wearisome responsibility. Sometimes I think that what alcoholics are most afraid of is being ordinary. Most of us seek in alcohol not only surcease from pain but also some kind of transcendent experience. In the beginning, we think we’ve found it. As William James said, “However we view things otherwise, under the influence they seem more utterly what they are, more ‘utterly utter’ than when we are sober.” The state of drunkenness, according to James, “expands, unites and says ‘Yes’” in contrast to the diminished “no” of sobriety. The alcohol advertisers are aware of this belief and they promise continued excitement and transcendence. Drinking is described as a way to “escape the ordinary,” to “defy mediocrity.” Alcohol is described as “The Impossible Cream,” “The Present Perfect,” and “Splendor in the Glass.” A beer commercial tells us to “Reach for what’s out there” and to “grab for all the gusto you can” (as if a product that numbs us can help us live more intensely).
Occasionally the promised transcendence is divine. Carl Jung described a craving for alcohol as “the equivalent, on a low level, of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness.” Certainly many alcoholics seek a spiritual experience in alcohol, some perfect connection. Another word for alcohol is “spirits.” “Absolut Grail,” says the vodka ad, featuring a knight’s hand reaching for the drink. Indeed the experience of drunkenness does involve a loss of self, a merging with the alcohol, that is a kind of perversion of a transcendent spiritual experience. This is played on in the many ads in which people are swimming in the alcohol, partying inside the bottle, or sometimes even living inside the bottle.
We are all susceptible to this incessant message that our lives are not exciting enough. It is hard not to feel that we are missing out on something—that everyone else is having more passionate sex (and far more often), more fun, more joy. But addicts are particularly susceptible to this message because many of us have a diminished capacity for joy. Some research indicates that we may have lower levels than nonaddicts of dopamine and serotonin, natural chemicals in the brain that regulate feelings of well-being, sadness, pleasure, and elation. It may be more difficult for us to experience euphoria or even a normal sense of well-being. Alcoholics often say that alcohol makes them feel “normal,” not high.
Many addicts need to experience things very intensely in order to feel anything at all. Although the stereotype of the male heavy drinker is of someone larger than life, a creature of hearty appetites, in truth he is far more likely to be suffering from depression. Most alcoholics also suffer from the tragic illusion, promoted heavily and with full intent by the advertising, that what pleasure and gusto we do experience comes from alcohol. Thus the ads that promise that alcohol will bring us joy, will bring magical pleasure into our lives, are especially and intentionally seductive to alcoholics and potential alcoholics.
“Just add Bacardi,” says an ad in which a splash of Bacardi rum transforms a walrus on an ice floe into one wearing sunglasses on a colorful tropical beach. Scores of ads show alcohol turning a black and white scene into blazing color, such as another ad in the Bacardi campaign that turns penguins into brilliant flamingos. “Day is grey,” says an ad for Black & White scotch, but “The night is Black & White.” When I was drinking, I, like most other alcoholics, believed that life without alcohol was gray and humdrum and two-dimensional, an Arctic tundra, but that alcohol flooded it with color and sensation and emotion.
Alcohol ads present a clear choice: fun and excitement with alcohol, or monotony and dreariness without it. “Saturday 2:17 PM,” says an ad featuring a man and two women drinking vodka and playing cards on the beach. “You could be home cataloguing your CD collection.” Of course, you also could be home playing with your children or writing a poem or meditating or taking a long walk with a friend. But these activities contribute nothing to a corporation’s bottom line.
In the beginning, alcohol and other drugs and addictions work. They do make us feel better, sometimes “normal” for the very first time. Initially they seem to add excitement to our lives. The great irony is that there is nothing more monotonous, more routine, more ultimately boring than being an addict. The addict’s world becomes more and more constricted, centered only on the drug or substance or activity. I used to look out my kitchen window at night, after I’d had a few drinks, and watch a traffic light turn from red to green to red and think “Is this all there is?” At the very same time, I was convinced that alcohol made my life exciting. This ability to hold two paradoxical beliefs in one’s mind is the essence of denial.
All addictions depend on denial. Denial isn’t lying (although that often comes with the territory). Denial is being able to hold contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously. It is seeing the evidence of one’s addiction everywhere and still believing that one is “in control.” “I can quit anytime,” is the self-deluding mantra of the addict.
In the strictest scientific sense, addiction is a state in which three criteria—dependence (physical and psychological), tolerance, and withdrawal—all exist. In the past several years, it has often been defined more broadly as the persistent compulsive use of a substance (or an activity such as gambling or work or sex) with harmful consequences for the user and other people. It is increasingly clear that most addictions, including those activities, have a biochemical component and genetic predisposition. Although we are not at all sure yet what causes addiction, there are no doubt many neurotransmitters and other brain chemicals involved, as well as cultural, environmental, and psychological factors.
All kinds of behavior are labeled addictive these days, from jogging to drinking lattes, but this trivializes the devastation caused by serious addictions. At the same time, it remains difficult for most people to accept the concept of addictions such as sex addiction, work addiction, and gambling addiction that are very real and very destructive to individuals, families, and the society as a whole. As James Royce said, “A common reward center that mediates euphoria may be the clue to cross-addiction and to the similarity with other compulsive behaviors.”
Advertising doesn’t cause addiction. But it does encourage people to experiment with drugs at an early age, thus placing them at greater risk for addiction. In addition to everything else, of course, the constant barrage of advertising for pain-relievers and headache remedies and other over-the-counter drugs teaches us that pain and other unpleasant states are avoidable through drugs. Many drugs are packaged and promoted to appeal to children, such as Gassy Gators, Better Bear Pops, and Kids-Eeze bubble gum. Although it is undoubtedly helpful for children’s medicine to taste better, there is a problem when medicine masquerades as candy.
Since the Food and Drug Administration loosened restraints on prescription drug advertising in 1997, there has been an explosion of drug ads. The pharmaceutical industry now spends over a billion dollars a year on advertising aimed at consumers, often using celebrity endorsers such as high-profile athletes. “Have you discovered the pain relief that lies behind this door?” says an ad for an analgesic featuring a closeup of a pharmacy door. And a campaign for another analgesic says, “Life got tougher. We got stronger.” As Lily Tomlin says, “Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs.”
Advertising also encourages compulsion, greed, and a belief in transformation via substances and goods. Perhaps most important, advertising creates a climate of denial in which addictions flourish. It creates this climate of denial, a climate in which harmful and compulsive attitudes toward the product (or activity, in the case of sex and gambling, for example) pass as normal, not only for the addict, but also for all those around him or her—family members, coworkers, doctors. This is absolutely essential because the makers of addictive products must prevent addicts from being confronted and perhaps forced into recovery. Every time an addict recovers, someone loses money, whether it’s the pusher on the corner or the pushers in the boardrooms. This is the bottom line.
The makers of addictive products prosper when a community or culture colludes with the addict’s version of reality. On most college campuses, for example, about 40 percent of the students are binge drinkers. However, the majority of students, if surveyed, believe that 80 or 90 percent of their fellow students are binge drinkers. This belief in and of itself makes it more likely that more students will tolerate the hazardous drinking of others and perhaps will drink more hazardously themselves. It also, of course, makes it far less likely that those students in serious trouble with alcohol will be identified and treated. By the same token, in a culture where almost everyone eats junk food, those who are eating it compulsively can pass for normal and avoid detection. And if promiscuous sex for men is glorified, as it is in this culture, then male sex addicts can end up lionized rather than treated, and the man who ditches his wife of thirty years for a trophy wife the age of his daughter is seen as a winner rather than as a cad.
No wonder advertising often normalizes disordered attitudes and even symptoms of addiction. The most obvious example is obsession. Alcohol, cigarettes, food, sex are at the center of the ads just as they are at the center of the addict’s life. The ads imply, for example, that alcohol is an appropriate adjunct to almost every activity, from making love to white-water canoeing. They also rationalize drinking at any time and for any reason, just as the alcoholic does. “A full day of shopping?” asks an ad for scotch, “Now that calls for a drink.” Another features a bottle of champagne on ice with the tagline “The meter maid actually bought your story.” I recently passed two billboards within a block of each other. The first offered beer as a reward and celebration because “Life is good.” The second offered tequila as a consolation because “Life is harsh.” Whatever one’s state of mind, whatever one’s circumstances, ads tell us that the appropriate response is to drink. Alcoholics are all too eager to believe this.
The wine industry has recently begun a campaign designed to deflate its special-occasion-only image. One commercial says, “You’re actually home watching TV? This is a special occasion.” A print ad says, “It is well to remember that there are five reasons for drinking: the arrival of a friend; one’s present or future thirst; the excellence of the wine; or any other reason.” And an ad aimed at the woman at home, alone except for her children says, “This is the wine you sip between the evening news, spilled milk, & ‘How was your day?’” Another in the same campaign says, “The while-you-set-the-table wine that usually gets invited to dinner,” and describes the product as “a wine you drink just about every day.” Of course, drinking alone “just about every day” is both a sign of and a route to trouble with alcohol—but in this campaign it is presented as just another innocuous part of one’s daily routine. The beer commercials that are indistinguishable from soft-drink commercials have a similar effect. This isn’t a drug, they seem to say, this is a harmless beverage that you can indulge in any time without consequences.
Progression is also one of the hallmarks of addiction. Most people begin the addictive process gradually—one or two drinks, a few cigarettes a day, a dish of ice cream, a joint, one hit of cocaine. Gradually they need more of the substance in order to achieve the same effect. Eventually they feel they cannot live without it and it becomes the center of their lives.
A classic example of normalizing progression occurred in a national beer campaign several years ago. In the late 1970s the slogan for Michelob was “Holidays were made for Michelob.” A year or so later it became “Weekends were made for Michelob.” It must have been apparent to the makers of Michelob that they would not make nearly enough money if people only drank their product on weekends, so the next slogan was “Put a little weekend in your week.” Eventually the slogan became “The night belongs to Michelob.” There is a world of difference between having a beer on a special occasion and feeling that your night belongs to alcohol. The Michelob campaign deliberately normalizes a potentially dangerous and destructive process. Perhaps the next slogan will be “Put a little Michelob in your morning.”
Thus alcohol ads tell the alcoholic and those around him or her, as well as impressionable young people, that it is all right, indeed splendid, to be obsessed with alcohol, to consume large quantities on a daily basis and to have it be a part of all one’s activities. At the same time, all signs of trouble and any hint of addiction are erased. Every instance of use seems spontaneous, unique. Bottles are magically unopened even when drinks have been poured. There is no drunkenness, only high spirits. There are never any negative consequences. The denial is unchallenged, indeed reinforced.
Ads for nonaddictive products can reinforce denial too. A 1998 Levi’s campaign features “real” teenagers revealing some personal anecdote or fragment of philosophy. One speaks of early morning surfing that makes him late for school. A musician brags about hooking up with two groupies in a ménage à trois. And another, when his father jokingly suggests that the neighbors think he is a gay drug user, says, “Dad, they don’t know that I’m gay . . . I mean, they don’t know that I do drugs.” According to ad reviewer Bob Garfield, “In the name of relating to teenagers and setting itself apart from adult authority, Levi Strauss is glamorizing a checklist of disturbing, self-destructive behaviors,” such as illegal drug use and reckless sex in the age of AIDS.
Signs of trouble with alcohol, even symptoms of alcoholism, are sometimes joked about, trivialized and normalized in ads. This is especially disturbing when the ads are obviously targeting young people. “How a night out with the guys became a long weekend,” says an ad for tequila that clearly normalizes and glamorizes binge drinking. Another ad in the same campaign has a similar message: “To them it was a holiday party, to their neighbors a reason to move.”
A shocking campaign for Malibu rum targets young people with messages that normalize blackouts as well as binge drinking, encouraging them to “Blame it on Malibu.” The ads feature young people partying in the Caribbean with headlines such as, “You’re going to call your boyfriend back home. As soon as you can remember his name,” and, “You’re 262 days late for work.” A blackout is a period of time while drinking which the drinker is never able to recall, in spite of being conscious at the time. Blackouts are very serious signs of trouble with alcohol. And, of course, many terrible things occur when drinkers are in blackouts, such as automobile crashes and especially heinous rapes, child abuse, and domestic violence. People coming out of blackouts are far more likely to find themselves in a bloody car wreck than on a tropical beach, just as girls who use alcohol to give themselves permission to be sexual are more likely to encounter rape than romance, pregnancy than passion.
Alcohol is related to parties, good times, celebrations, and fun, but it is also related to murder, suicide, unemployment, and child abuse, and these connections are never made in the ads. Of course, one would not expect them to be. The advertisers are selling their product and it is their job to erase any negative aspect as well as to enhance or invent the positive ones. However, when the product is the nation’s most destructive drug, the consequences go far beyond product sales. The alcohol industry spends over two billion dollars a year promoting its product, a product that is undeniably used in a low-risk way and with pleasure by many people but that is also undeniably a problem for many, with dreadful consequences for the entire society. Certainly it is not only the alcoholic who suffers. According to a recent Gallup survey, one out of three Americans today says that alcohol has been the cause of trouble in his or her family. Countless others are the victims of alcohol-related accidents and crimes. Everyone is affected by the economic and psychological costs.
Of course, alcoholism is not the only addiction. Millions of people are also addicted to other drugs, including nicotine, and to overeating, gambling, sex, and other activities, and most addicts are cross-addicted. Many people consider addiction our society’s major problem. As I have said repeatedly, advertising doesn’t cause addictions. But it does create a climate of denial and it contributes mightily to a belief in the quick fix, instant gratification, the dreamworld, and escape from all pain and boredom. All of this is part of what addicts believe and what we hope for when we reach for our particular substance.
But there is something else going on too, at a much deeper level. We don’t reach for our drugs just for escape or transcendence or relief from pain. We reach for them in the hope of making a connection. Addiction begins with the hope that something “out there” can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. Advertising is all about this false hope.
Above all, addiction is a romance, a love affair—a relationship that goes terribly wrong. Advertising most contributes to the addictive mindset by trivializing human relationships and encouraging us to feel that we are in relationships with our products, especially with those products that are addictive. This not only disappoints us. It also diverts attention from what would really satisfy us and make us happy—meaningful work, authentic relationships, and a sense of connection with history, community, nature, and the cosmos. We end up looking for love in all the wrong places—which could be the very definition of addiction.