Things We Find on the Grocery Store Shelves…

There's actually nothing new here:

Cigarettes are designed for addiction.
http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/tobaccosmoke/factsheet.html

•The design and contents of tobacco products make them more attractive and addictive than ever before. Cigarettes today deliver nicotine more quickly from the lungs to the heart and brain.
•While nicotine is the key chemical compound that causes and sustains the powerful addicting effects of cigarettes, other ingredients and design features make them even more attractive and more addictive.
•The powerful addicting elements of tobacco products affect multiple types of nicotine receptors in the brain.
•Evidence suggests that psychosocial, biologic, and genetic factors may also play a role in nicotine addiction.
•Adolescents’ bodies are more sensitive to nicotine, and adolescents are more easily addicted than adults. This helps explain why about 1,000 teenagers become daily smokers every day.

Addiction by design
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2011/01/addiction-by-design/

A new report released by the US Surgeon General last month reminds us that cigarettes are designed with addiction in mind. Tobacco companies infuse tobacco with ammonia so that the nicotine crosses the membranes in the lungs faster, reducing the delay between inhalation and pharmacological effect. They add flavourings like chocolate and vanilla to the blend, knowing that smokers will be more likely to smell something in their food that they associate with smoking, and to feel like lighting up. These tricks are a source of moral outrage for many of us; it seems as though the tobacco companies are exploiting weaknesses in our biology to make us buy things we would not otherwise have bought, and to do things we would not otherwise have done (or would not have done so much). And tobacco executives have often denied engaging in these kinds of tactics.......

.....Sure enough, it looks like videogames give rise to behaviours with all the characteristic traits of an addiction. There is withdrawal, and tolerance, and excessive patterns of use, with the average South-Korean high school student spending 23 hours per week gaming. There are self-help groups, children dying from neglect, and people dying of exhaustion at their chair. There are strong neural correlations between the brains of people who are addicted to drugs and those who are ‘addicted’ to games. And depending how addiction is defined, somewhere between 3% and 30% of game players would be classified as addicted (this itself demonstrates how hazy the concept is). It seems as though nearly every reason for avoiding becoming addicted to drugs applies to games; while gaming isn’t toxic in the same way that cigarette smoke or alcohol is, it can lead to health problems when done to excess.