“You can’t sue us for making opiods ‘too pleasurable’, say major drug manufacturers in response to addiction lawsuits.”
The reality is that it comes down to motive. In the case of the Sackler family, lawsuits showed that they were effectively trying to get people addicted to their opiods. They lied about them, claiming they weren’t addictive. They tried to push doctors to prescribe them for everything from sports injuries to arthritis, not just for ultra-serious pains like from cancer. They were rewarding doctors for prescribing them, even when it was obvious those doctors were just selling drugs to addicted patients. They especially liked to try to talk to doctors who were not pain specialists. Sales reps were trained in how to overcome objections from doctors, like saying “The delivery system is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug”, even though they knew that wasn’t true. They gave doctors all-expenses paid junkets to Boca Raton, Florida to attend seminars on OxyContin.
If a developer ends up making a really good game that keeps you wanting more, that’s one thing. But, if you have internal messages from that developer talking about how they can hack dopamine releases and keep people coming back, that’s another thing. If internal messages are about the “whales” and how to get them to cough up the most money, that’s yet another one. If someone leaks internal memos where employees are laughing at idiots who are ruined after spending all their money on loot boxes, that’s even worse.
IMO, the developers who really need to be sued are the ones developing gambling machines. They seem ultra-optimized for addiction, and to extract as much possible cash from the victim. It’s amazing that that kind of thing is legal, but as long as it’s legal, it needs to be heavily regulated so that gamblers are actually having a good time, not that they’re simply being slowly drained of their blood.
“You can’t sue us for making opiods ‘too pleasurable’, say major drug manufacturers in response to addiction lawsuits.”
The reality is that it comes down to motive. In the case of the Sackler family, lawsuits showed that they were effectively trying to get people addicted to their opiods. They lied about them, claiming they weren’t addictive. They tried to push doctors to prescribe them for everything from sports injuries to arthritis, not just for ultra-serious pains like from cancer. They were rewarding doctors for prescribing them, even when it was obvious those doctors were just selling drugs to addicted patients. They especially liked to try to talk to doctors who were not pain specialists. Sales reps were trained in how to overcome objections from doctors, like saying “The delivery system is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug”, even though they knew that wasn’t true. They gave doctors all-expenses paid junkets to Boca Raton, Florida to attend seminars on OxyContin.
If a developer ends up making a really good game that keeps you wanting more, that’s one thing. But, if you have internal messages from that developer talking about how they can hack dopamine releases and keep people coming back, that’s another thing. If internal messages are about the “whales” and how to get them to cough up the most money, that’s yet another one. If someone leaks internal memos where employees are laughing at idiots who are ruined after spending all their money on loot boxes, that’s even worse.
IMO, the developers who really need to be sued are the ones developing gambling machines. They seem ultra-optimized for addiction, and to extract as much possible cash from the victim. It’s amazing that that kind of thing is legal, but as long as it’s legal, it needs to be heavily regulated so that gamblers are actually having a good time, not that they’re simply being slowly drained of their blood.