Marketing Pleasure: How Addictive Drug Industries Tell Big Lies to Make Big Profits

Marketing Pleasure: How Addictive Drug Industries Tell Big Lies to Make Big Profits

Nicotine killed nearly everyone in her family. Now, with a “pit bull’s tenacity,” she’s taking on the industry that profits from endangering millions of Americans. Every year, tobacco kills 480,000, alcohol kills 178,000, and opioids kill more than 100,000 Americans. Yet these industries continue to perpetuate lies to protect their bottom lines. Marketing Pleasure exposes the manipulative tactics the tobacco industry perfected to deceive the public for decades: denying science; targeting children, teenagers, and young adults; increasing drugs’ addictive properties; and flooding the market with billions in unethical marketing and advertising. And now, as the marijuana industry pushes for widespread legalization, the same tactics are being used again. This investigative nonfiction book reveals what to know about Big Tobacco’s dirty playbook used to market legalized drugs. It exposes how three billionaires manipulated the system to legalize the drug—first for medical, then recreational use—while the evidence of harm piles up. It also chronicles the battle fought by the National Parent Movement, which took youth marijuana use from historic highs to lows in just fourteen years. A call to arms from the woman who led National Families in Action for forty-six years, Marketing Pleasure asks: Do we want to add a fourth legal drug to our nation’s deadly marketplace, knowing the truth of the lies we’re fed? “You can’t say you know drug policy and how we got here without reading this book. Sue Rusche is a national treasure, and this book is a gift to the country desperate for answers.” — Kevin Sabet, PhD, founder, president, and CEO, Foundation for Drug Policy Solutions and Smart Approaches to Marijuana. “ Marketing Pleasure …tells the gripping story of how billionaires and rich corporations lied about these drugs’ dangers, and how everyday heroes fought back against their greed and deceit. With tobacco, alcohol, and drugs each killing more than 100,000 Americans a year, the perils and the need for this historical guide have never been greater.” — Jonathan P. Caulkins, PhD, H. Guyford Stever Professor of Operations Research and Public Policy, Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, and coauthor of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know. “The indomitable Sue Rusche harnessed and united the national parent drug and alcohol prevention movement in the late ’70s with Southern charm and a pit bull’s tenacity. Look out Big Pharma, her new book, Marketing Pleasure directs that expertise to a ravaged public…This is a must-read for all.” — Susan Kendall Newman, former executive director of the Scott Newman Foundation, social/political writer, producer, activist, and philanthropist.