For a long time, I thought addiction was a private struggle. Something that happened quietly, behind closed doors. Painful, yes, but mostly the result of personal choices or bad luck. I assumed it was a consequence of bad habits, poor decisions, or maybe just being born with the wrong genes.
What I didn’t see—at least not right away—was that addiction could also be a business. And not just a side effect of it, but the actual plan. I didn’t pick this up from the news. It wasn’t one big revelation, just quiet stories that kept piling up. I kept hearing about people who got addicted. Not because they were careless, but because they were trying to survive. The more I read, the more disturbing it felt.
In 2010, Purdue Pharma made over $3 billion selling just one drug named OxyContin. That was just one company selling one drug in one year. At the same time, thousands of families were losing their loved ones. According to reports, many had died after being prescribed that very drug by doctors they trusted.
That’s when I started to see the truth: this wasn’t just a health issue. It was a business model. Addiction wasn’t always an accident. In some cases, it was engineered. The pain. The cravings. The dependence. They were all part of the design. What looked like a national crisis was, for some companies, a financial success.
I’ve never struggled with addiction myself, and no one close to me has either. And even if I wasn’t the target audience, even if I had never popped a single pill, that doesn’t excuse me from responsibility. Because when a system is built on keeping people dependent, we all have to ask harder questions. Questions about how profit finds its way into healthcare, and also into decisions that look like help, but turn out to harm.
This isn’t about blaming people. It’s about looking closer at the systems that profit from their pain and asking why we let them.
How Addiction Became a Business
Addiction was once seen as a personal weakness. Then it was redefined as a medical condition. But over the past few decades, it’s morphed into something else entirely: a profitable industry.
Take the opioid crisis in the United States. In the 1990s, pharmaceutical companies, most notably Purdue Pharma, started pushing prescription painkillers like OxyContin as safe, low-risk treatments for chronic pain. They didn’t just target patients. They spent millions influencing doctors through glossy brochures, sponsored conferences, and an army of sales reps. Their message was that these drugs were being unfairly overlooked. They dismissed concerns about addiction as exaggerated.
Privately, they knew better. Internal documents later showed that Purdue was aware of growing reports of addiction. But instead of sounding the alarm, they brushed it aside. What mattered was selling more pills. In this business model, addiction wasn’t a mistake. It was part of the plan.
The consequences were devastating. From 1999 to 2020, nearly half a million Americans died from opioid overdoses. Purdue eventually paid billions in settlements and declared bankruptcy. But the system that turned pain into profit didn’t vanish. It evolved.
The Mechanics of Selling Dependence
There’s a formula for how addiction is packaged and sold. It starts with pain, whether physical, emotional, or mental. Then comes a promise: relief, escape, or a sense of control. The product is marketed as the solution.
In the case of opioids, this played out through glossy brochures, sponsored medical research, and subtle changes in the language doctors used with patients. But the mechanics aren’t unique to pharmaceuticals. You’ll find similar patterns in gambling, fast food, social media, and even certain wellness supplements. The approach is often the same:
- Identify a human vulnerability (pain, boredom, anxiety, loneliness).
- Offer a fast solution.
- Normalise repeated use.
- Make quitting difficult or stigmatised.
Marketing makes the dependency feel rational and sometimes even desirable. A casino isn’t just a place to lose money; it’s “entertainment.” A sugary drink isn’t empty calories; it’s “a reward after a long day.” Social media doesn’t hijack your attention; it “keeps you connected.”
The brilliance and danger of these industries is that they often operate without ever having to call their product addictive. But they benefit from the behaviours all the same.
Why This Matters Today
It’s easy to see addiction as someone else’s problem, especially if you haven’t experienced it. But this goes beyond isolated cases. It forces us to ask deeper questions about the kind of world we’re allowing to exist. Because as long as addiction makes money, there will be companies willing to ‘manufacture it’.
That’s why we have to pay attention. This isn’t just about opioids. It’s about how pain can be packaged and sold. It’s about what happens when systems are built to serve profit, not people. And it’s a warning: when an industry makes more money from your suffering, staying unwell stops being a side effect.
We live in a world shaped by these incentives. So even if you’ve never dealt with addiction personally, your awareness still matters. Because attention is the first thing these industries capture and the first step in pulling you in. Understanding how addiction is engineered doesn’t just reveal the manipulation. It gives us the tools to resist it.
The Cost of Looking Away
For a long time, I thought addiction was something that happened to other people. I felt bad for them. But I didn’t think it had anything to do with me.
Still, I know the feeling of reaching for my phone the second I’m bored. Of eating just to fill silence. Of chasing little hits of comfort without thinking. It’s not the same as opioid addiction—not even close—but it shows me how deeply wired the craving for relief really is.
That pull lives in all of us. And when entire systems are built to exploit that pull, it becomes a shared problem, whether we notice it or not.
The opioid crisis exposed how addiction was deliberately created and normalised without public awareness. It showed that medicine and marketing often overlap in ways that harm people. When profits rely on keeping people hooked, even trusted institutions can become predators.
Instead of asking if addiction could happen to me, I should ask: What in my daily life is engineered to keep me dependent? That’s a hard truth to face, but it’s the only way to fight back.
Today, pain is something companies sell. Relief is a brand. Attention is the currency they chase. But we don’t have to accept this. We can be more aware. We can see what we’re truly feeding our needs or their profits. What’s done is done. But we owe it to ourselves to stop ignoring the truth. Even from afar, we can refuse to look away.
