The Addiction Economy: How Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Entertainment Profit From Your Slavery by Jeff Callaway

The Addiction Economy: How Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Entertainment Profit From Your Slavery

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

I. PROLOGUE — THE CHAIN GANG WITH NO BARS

Picture a prison without walls. No iron bars. No armed guards. No whips cracking across backs under a brutal sun. Just you, sitting in your living room, bathed in the blue glow of a screen at three in the morning, unable to stop scrolling. Just you, reaching for the pill bottle again because the pain of being awake and present has become unbearable. Just you, clicking on that link one more time even though you promised yourself this morning would be different.

This is America in 2025. We are voluntary prisoners in an Addiction Economy—a sprawling, multi-trillion-dollar system engineered not to serve human flourishing but to manufacture and exploit human dependency. The chains are invisible but they are real. They are made of dopamine and algorithms, of engineered chemicals and calculated marketing campaigns, of carefully crafted experiences designed to hijack the very machinery of your soul.

We celebrate this slavery as freedom. We call it choice. We tell ourselves we can quit anytime. But the numbers tell a different story. The overdose deaths tell a different story. The shattered marriages and abandoned children and hollow-eyed teenagers tell a different story.

Make no mistake—this is not merely bad business ethics or unfortunate side effects of progress. This is systemic, intentional exploitation of human weakness for profit. This is an entire economic structure that depends on your bondage to function. And behind it all lies a spiritual battle as old as Eden itself.

Addiction is not morally neutral. It is not a lifestyle choice or a personal preference. It is a battlefield for the human soul, and entire industries have chosen their side.

II. THE BIBLICAL AND CATHOLIC FRAMEWORK — WHAT THE CHURCH SAYS ABOUT SLAVERY, ADDICTION, AND FREEDOM

A. Scripture: Slavery of the Flesh vs. Freedom in Christ

Saint Paul understood slavery. He wrote about it constantly, not the political slavery of chains and auction blocks, but the deeper slavery—the bondage of the human will to sin itself. In his letter to the Romans, Paul cries out with a recognition that should pierce every one of us: "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do."

This is the human condition laid bare. This is addiction in its rawest form—the soul trapped in a cycle it cannot break by willpower alone. Paul describes himself as sold under sin, as a slave to a law working in his members, waging war against the law of his mind. The struggle is real. The slavery is real.

But Paul also proclaims liberation: "You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men." Christ paid the ransom for our freedom, not so we could trade one master for another, but so we could serve righteousness instead of sin. The Christian understanding of freedom is not the modern delusion that freedom means indulging every desire. Freedom, in the biblical sense, is the ability to choose the good—to be able to say no to sin and yes to God.

The ancient world worshiped idols. So do we. Our idols just have different names: pleasure, distraction, numbness, control. And like the idols of old, these false gods demand sacrifice. They demand your time, your money, your relationships, your dignity, your soul. The only difference is that our idols come with quarterly earnings reports.

B. The Catechism on Human Dignity and Addiction

The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks clearly about the dignity of the human person as body and soul, created in the image and likeness of God. Addiction wounds that dignity. It wounds freedom itself.

The Church teaches that temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It disposes us to avoid every kind of excess—the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco, or medicine. The use of drugs inflicts very grave damage on human health and life, and their use, except on strictly therapeutic grounds, is a grave offense.

Here is where the Church's wisdom becomes crucial: The Catechism recognizes that addiction diminishes freedom. A person caught in addiction is no longer fully free—their will is compromised, their ability to choose is impaired. The Church does not heap condemnation on the addict. She recognizes the wound.

But the Church reserves her strongest language for those who profit from creating and sustaining that wound. Those engaged in the production and trafficking of drugs constitute direct cooperation in evil, since they encourage people to practices gravely contrary to the moral law. The same principle applies to all who build business models on human addiction. When you establish social structures that lead to the decline of morals and make Christian conduct practically impossible, you become guilty of scandal—of leading others into sin.

The pharmaceutical executive who knows his opioid is destroying communities but keeps selling anyway. The tech designer who programs addictive features into apps used by children. The pornography producer who profits from the degradation of human sexuality. These are not morally neutral actors. These are people who have made a choice to profit from human misery.

C. The Theology of Vice and Virtue

Our culture has forgotten temperance entirely. We mock self-denial as repressive. We celebrate indulgence as liberation. We have created an anti-asceticism, a constant training in giving in to every impulse, every craving, every desire.

Christianity calls us to something radically different. We are called to discipline. To fasting. To vigilance. To taking up our cross daily. The Christian life is one of spiritual warfare, and addiction is one of the enemy's most effective weapons. It trains us in slavery when we should be training for freedom. It forms us in vice when we should be forming ourselves in virtue.

The contrast could not be starker. Modern consumer culture tells you to follow your heart, trust your feelings, do what makes you happy. The Gospel tells you to die to yourself, take up your cross, lose your life to find it. One path leads to slavery disguised as freedom. The other leads to freedom that looks like slavery until you experience it.

III. BIG PHARMA — TURNING PAIN INTO A RECURRING REVENUE STREAM

A. The Medicalization of Suffering

Something shifted in American medicine over the past three decades. We moved from a culture that understood suffering as part of human existence to a culture that treats all discomfort as pathology requiring pharmaceutical intervention. Pain became the fifth vital sign. Every ailment became a potential prescription. Normal human suffering became a market opportunity.

The redefinition was subtle but profound. Grief became depression requiring medication. Shyness became social anxiety disorder. Difficulty focusing became ADHD. Menopause became a disease. Aging became a condition. And behind every new diagnosis stood a pharmaceutical company with a solution—a solution that required long-term use, regular refills, and lifetime management.

Medicine drifted from healing to management. The goal was no longer to cure but to create patients who would need treatment forever. A healed patient is a lost customer. A managed patient is a reliable revenue stream.

B. Engineered Dependency

The pharmaceutical industry did not stumble into the opioid crisis by accident. They engineered it. They studied addiction. They understood tolerance. They knew exactly what would happen when they pushed doctors to prescribe higher doses for longer periods. They knew, and they did it anyway because the profits were staggering.

Consider the language manipulation. OxyContin was marketed as less addictive than other opioids. The claim was based on the extended-release formulation, which was supposed to reduce abuse potential. But Purdue Pharma knew people were crushing the pills to defeat the time-release mechanism. They knew, and they kept marketing it as safer.

Tolerance and dependency are not unfortunate side effects—they are predictable outcomes that pharmaceutical companies count on. When a patient develops tolerance, they need higher doses. When they try to stop, they experience withdrawal. The cycle is built into the chemistry, and the companies know it.

Doctors were incentivized to prescribe. Sales representatives received bonuses for pushing higher doses. Medical conferences became marketing opportunities. Pain management became synonymous with opioid prescribing. Counties where pharmaceutical companies spent more money on doctor incentives saw higher rates of prescriptions and higher rates of overdose deaths. The correlation is undeniable.

C. The Opioid Crisis as Case Study

The opioid epidemic has claimed over 300,000 American lives since 2000, with projections suggesting another half million deaths over the next decade. These are not statistics. These are sons and daughters. Mothers and fathers. Brothers and sisters. Entire communities have been hollowed out—rural America and working-class neighborhoods devastated by a crisis that was manufactured for profit.

Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family made billions from OxyContin. Eight people in a single family, pursuing profit, caused immeasurable death and destruction. When they were finally held accountable, they negotiated settlements that allowed them to avoid admitting fault. They treated legal penalties as business expenses. The settlements totaled about 50 billion dollars paid over 18 years by multiple companies—a fraction of the revenue generated and a sum that pales next to Johnson and Johnson's annual sales of 95 billion dollars alone.

Communities destroyed. Lives lost. Families shattered. And the companies responsible treated it as the cost of doing business.

This is not capitalism. This is evil wearing a business suit.

D. Funding the Cure While Causing the Disease

Here is where the perversity reaches its peak: pharmaceutical companies now fund addiction treatment programs. They profit from creating the addiction, then profit from treating it. It is a circular economy of harm and help, where the same companies that caused the crisis now position themselves as part of the solution.

Purdue Pharma profited from OxyContin and from medications to treat opioid addiction. The moral obscenity of this cannot be overstated. This is not restitution—this is reputation laundering. This is blood money attempting to buy legitimacy.

The Catholic principle is clear: those who cause harm have an obligation to make restitution. But restitution requires acknowledgment of wrongdoing, repentance, and genuine amendment of life. Pharmaceutical companies have done none of these things. They have simply calculated that settlements are cheaper than changing their business model.

IV. BIG TECH — DOPAMINE AS A SERVICE

A. The Attention Economy Explained

If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. This is the foundational truth of social media and most of the modern internet. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube—these platforms are not in the business of connecting you with friends or entertaining you. They are in the business of monetizing your attention.

Every moment you spend on their platform is a moment they can sell to advertisers. Every scroll, every click, every second of engagement is data they can harvest and commodify. You are not the customer. You are the inventory being sold.

The goal is not your well-being. The goal is not human flourishing or genuine connection. The goal is maximum screen time, maximum engagement, maximum data extraction. And they have discovered that the most effective way to achieve that goal is to make their platforms addictive.

B. Addiction by Design

This is not an accident. This is not an unintended consequence. Tech companies have deliberately built addiction into their platforms using every psychological trick discovered by behavioral science.

Infinite scroll eliminates natural stopping points. You never reach the end. There is always more content. Push notifications interrupt your focus constantly, training your brain to check your device compulsively. Variable reward schedules—the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive—ensure that you never know when the next like or comment will arrive, keeping your brain in a state of constant anticipation.

Engineers at these companies have studied gambling addiction, substance addiction, and behavioral psychology. They know exactly what they are doing. Former Facebook executives have admitted that they built systems to exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology. They created features specifically designed to consume as much user time and attention as possible.

Children and adolescents are particular targets. Their brains are still developing. Their impulse control is not fully formed. They are neurologically vulnerable, and tech companies exploit that vulnerability deliberately. Studies show that teens who check social media more than 15 times daily show altered brain sensitivity in regions critical for decision-making and emotional regulation. The platforms know this. They target kids anyway.

C. Effects on the Human Soul

The spiritual consequences of social media addiction are devastating. The constant fragmentation of attention destroys the ability to think deeply, to pray contemplatively, to be present to God and others. Silence becomes unbearable. Solitude becomes terrifying. The interior life withers and dies, replaced by an endless stream of external noise.

Social media fills every moment of boredom—those precious spaces where God used to speak to us in the quiet. We have trained ourselves to reach for the phone the instant we are alone with our thoughts. We have lost the capacity for contemplation, for reflection, for simply being present.

The replacement of the interior life with constant stimulation is a spiritual catastrophe. Prayer requires silence. Discernment requires solitude. Relationship with God requires the ability to be still and know that He is God. But we cannot be still. We cannot be silent. We have become addicted to the noise.

D. Social Media and the False Self

Social media encourages the creation of a curated identity—a false self carefully constructed for public consumption. We become performers on a digital stage, constantly anxious about how we are perceived, endlessly comparing ourselves to others, trapped in cycles of envy and inadequacy.

The platforms have discovered that certain emotions drive engagement better than others. Anger is profitable. Outrage is profitable. Lust is profitable. The algorithms prioritize content that triggers these emotional responses because triggered users spend more time on the platform. We are being trained in vice, not virtue. We are being formed in anger, envy, pride, and lust because these emotions make money.

The spiritual consequence is the gradual deformation of the soul. We become what we practice. If we practice outrage, we become angry. If we practice comparison, we become envious. If we practice lust, we become lustful. Social media is forming us in the image of our worst impulses.

V. BIG ENTERTAINMENT — DIGITAL BREAD AND CIRCUSES

A. From Leisure to Escapism

Entertainment used to mean rest—a temporary break from labor to refresh body and soul before returning to meaningful work. Modern entertainment has become something different. It has become escapism—a way of avoiding life rather than resting from it.

Streaming services offer infinite content. Video games offer infinite progression. The binge has replaced the break. We do not rest anymore. We sedate ourselves. We numb ourselves. We hide from reality in fantasy worlds carefully designed to keep us coming back.

This is packaged as self-care. Taking care of yourself means retreating into screens. But this is not care. This is avoidance. This is the slow death of the examined life. This is cowardice disguised as comfort.

B. Video Games and Pornified Storytelling

Modern video games employ the same dopamine loop mechanics as social media and gambling. Progression systems, loot boxes, daily rewards, and achievement systems are all designed to create psychological dependency. The games never end. There is always another level, another achievement, another item to collect.

Meanwhile, the content grows increasingly sexualized. Female characters are designed to appeal to male lust. Storylines normalize casual sex and moral relativism. The distinction between protagonist and antagonist blurs. The hero's journey becomes the power fantasy. Moral courage collapses into moral nihilism.

Young men spend thousands of hours in these virtual worlds, training themselves in moral indifference and sexual objectification. Then we wonder why they struggle to form real relationships with real women.

C. Pornography as the Nuclear Core of the Addiction Economy

If we are going to tell the truth about the Addiction Economy, we must tell the truth about pornography. This is the nuclear core—the most profitable, most destructive, most spiritually devastating form of digital addiction.

The pornography industry generates tens of billions of dollars annually through a business model based on addiction and escalation. They give away free content to hook users, knowing that free users generate data and that addiction drives escalation to paid content. They profit from human degradation on both sides—the consumer who destroys his soul and the performer who sells her body.

The Catechism states clearly that pornography is a grave offense. It removes sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners to display them to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act. It does grave injury to the dignity of everyone involved—actors, vendors, and viewers. It immerses all in a fantasy world that is fundamentally a lie.

Pornography addiction often follows a four-stage progression: addiction, where free control is lost; escalation, where progressively harder content is needed to achieve the same arousal; desensitization, where shocking or immoral material becomes normalized; and acting out, where fantasy becomes behavior.

The Church's teaching is grounded in the affirmation of human dignity revealed fully in Christ and the gift of human sexuality in God's plan. When we reject pornography, we are not being prudish or repressive. We are defending the truth of the human person.

VI. THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE — HOW THESE INDUSTRIES FEED EACH OTHER

A. Cross-Industry Reinforcement

These industries do not operate in isolation. They reinforce each other in a symbiotic relationship of mutual profit. Tech platforms advertise pharmaceuticals. Entertainment normalizes drug use and sexual vice. Pharmaceutical companies medicate the anxiety and depression caused by technology addiction and porn addiction.

The teenager who develops anxiety from social media gets prescribed SSRIs. The young man addicted to pornography numbs his shame with alcohol or marijuana. The worker crushed by meaningless labor escapes into video games and streaming. Each industry feeds customers to the others.

B. Manufactured Despair, Marketed Relief

The pattern is diabolical in its elegance: create the wound, sell the bandage, never allow healing. Technology creates loneliness and anxiety. Pharmaceuticals offer chemical management. Entertainment offers temporary escape. But none of these offers genuine healing because healing would end the profit cycle.

A healed person does not need ongoing treatment. A truly connected person does not need social media. A person at peace does not need constant entertainment. The Addiction Economy depends on maintaining your misery while appearing to relieve it.

C. The Logic of Hell

CS Lewis described hell as a place where everyone gets what they want but nobody gets what they need. The Addiction Economy operates on the same principle. It gives you what your fallen nature craves while ensuring you never receive what your soul actually needs.

This is not accidental. This is structural. This is a system that requires human misery to function. And there is a demonic pattern here—tempt, enslave, then blame the enslaved. The industries create the addiction, profit from it, then tell you that your inability to quit is a personal failing, a lack of willpower, a character flaw.

This is the logic of hell. Give the appetite what it wants until the person is destroyed, then tell them it was their fault.

VII. THE FAMILY UNDER SIEGE

A. Children as Primary Targets

Children are the most valuable customers in the Addiction Economy because hooking them early creates lifetime dependency. Brain chemistry formed during childhood and adolescence persists into adulthood. A child addicted to screens at age 10 becomes an adult customer for life.

The statistics are horrifying. By age 10, nearly a third of children have viewed pornography. The largest consumers of internet pornography are children ages 12 to 17. TikTok usage among teens is nearly universal—67 percent use it, with over half using it daily. These children are being neurologically rewired before they develop the capacity for moral reasoning.

Early exposure to pornography is linked to sexual aggression, inability to form healthy relationships, and addiction. Early social media use is linked to depression, anxiety, and suicide. Video game addiction correlates with academic failure and social isolation. We are raising a generation of addicts, and the companies engineering this devastation face no real consequences.

B. Breakdown of the Domestic Church

The family—the domestic church—is under direct assault. Screens replace parents as the primary influence in children's lives. Substances numb marital conflict instead of couples learning to communicate and forgive. The shared prayer, shared meals, and shared silence that once formed family life have been replaced by individual consumption of digital content.

Dad is on his phone during dinner. Mom is binge-watching Netflix after the kids go to bed. The teenagers are in their rooms on social media until 2 AM. The family unit fragments into isolated individuals, all consuming content, none truly present to each other. The domestic church collapses into a collection of strangers living in the same house.

C. Intergenerational Consequences

Addiction passes down through generations, both culturally and biologically. Children of addicts are more likely to become addicts. But more than that, the trauma of growing up in a home broken by addiction gets monetized. The wounded child grows into the anxious adult, who becomes the customer for anxiety medications, therapy apps, and self-help content.

The cycle perpetuates itself. The Addiction Economy does not just destroy this generation—it sets up the next generation to be destroyed in turn. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and entire industries profit from intergenerational trauma.

VIII. CHRISTIAN COMPLICITY — THE UNCOMFORTABLE MIRROR

A. Calling Out the Faithful

Before we get too comfortable condemning secular industries, we need to hold up a mirror to the Christian community. How many of us condemn pornography while spending hours scrolling social media? How many of us preach temperance while being slaves to our devices? How many of us claim to follow Christ while showing more devotion to Netflix than to the Bible?

Christians who spend Mass checking their phones are not experiencing the Real Presence—they are experiencing screen presence. Christians who replace prayer time with scroll time have made a choice about which master they serve. Christians who justify their pharmaceutical dependence or alcohol use as necessary while condemning illegal drugs are engaged in moral hypocrisy.

We need to be honest about our own addictions. Device addiction is real. Entertainment addiction is real. The fact that these are socially acceptable does not make them spiritually harmless. If you cannot go 24 hours without checking social media, you are addicted. If you cannot handle discomfort without medicating it, you have a dependency. If you spend more time on screens than in prayer, you have chosen your god.

B. Soft Christianity vs. the Cross

Much of modern American Christianity has become therapeutic rather than transformative. We want a Jesus who comforts us without challenging us. We want grace without repentance, mercy without justice, heaven without the cross. We want Christianity to make us feel better about ourselves rather than calling us to die to ourselves.

This soft Christianity has no defense against the Addiction Economy because it has already surrendered the core of the faith. Christianity without fasting is Christianity without discipline. Christianity without self-denial is Christianity without the cross. Christianity that never says no to the flesh is Christianity that has been co-opted by the culture it should be challenging.

Christ is not a comfort object. Christ is Lord. And His first call to every disciple is the same: deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me. There is no following Him without denying the false self. There is no cross without suffering. There is no resurrection without death.

IX. THE WAY OUT — CATHOLIC RESISTANCE IN AN ADDICTIVE WORLD

A. Naming the Enemy

The first step to freedom is naming the enemy. This is not just personal sin. This is spiritual warfare against principalities and powers, against systems of evil that enslave entire populations. The Addiction Economy is a demonic system that must be recognized as such.

Call it what it is. When a company designs addictive features targeting children, call it evil. When a pharmaceutical company knowingly fuels an epidemic for profit, call it evil. When an entertainment industry corrupts human sexuality for money, call it evil. Naming the enemy breaks the power of euphemism and self-deception.

But we must also name our own complicity. The industries could not exist without willing consumers. We must acknowledge our own slavery before we can seek freedom.

B. Asceticism as Rebellion

In a culture of unlimited indulgence, self-denial becomes a revolutionary act. Fasting is defiance against an economy built on consumption. Silence is resistance against noise as a commodity. Sabbath rest is protest against productivity idolatry.

The Church has always known that freedom comes through discipline. Temperance—the moderation of desires—is built through practice. You do not become temperate by thinking about temperance. You become temperate by saying no to excess, repeatedly, until the virtue becomes habit.

This means practical asceticism. Fast from food to remember that man does not live by bread alone. Fast from screens to reclaim your attention for God. Fast from entertainment to rediscover the richness of silence. These are not punishments. These are acts of spiritual training that build the muscles needed for freedom.

C. Sacraments as Liberation

The Sacraments are God's appointed means of grace, and they are the Catholic answer to addiction. Confession functions as spiritual detox—bringing sin into the light, receiving absolution, breaking the power of secrecy and shame. Regular Confession prevents the accumulation of sin that leads to bondage.

The Eucharist is true nourishment for the soul. It is the antidote to the false satisfactions offered by the world. When we receive Christ in the Eucharist, we are receiving the only thing that can truly satisfy our hunger. The difference between grace and dopamine is the difference between bread and stones. One gives life. The other only appears to.

The Sacraments require sacramental living. You cannot receive the Eucharist on Sunday and return to addiction on Monday without the disconnect destroying your soul. The Sacraments demand that we cooperate with grace, that we make real changes, that we allow God to transform us.

D. Rebuilding the Domestic Church

The family must become again what it was meant to be—a domestic church where faith is lived and transmitted. This requires intentional choices against the culture.

Establish screen discipline in your home. Set boundaries on device usage. Create phone-free zones and phone-free times. If your children are growing up staring at screens instead of seeing your face, they are being formed by technology instead of by you.

Restore shared prayer. Pray the Rosary as a family. Pray before meals. Teach your children to pray before bed. Prayer must become as routine as eating if it is to become foundational to their lives.

Reclaim boredom. Let your children be bored. Boredom is not the enemy—it is fertile ground for imagination, creativity, and ultimately, prayer. A child who cannot tolerate boredom will become an adult addicted to stimulation.

Build family traditions that do not involve screens. Family meals. Family walks. Family game nights with actual board games. Family service projects. Rebuild the bonds that technology has severed.

X. EPILOGUE — FREEDOM IS NOT FREE

Return to the image with which we began—the prison without walls. The Addiction Economy has convinced us that our chains are freedom, that our slavery is choice, that our captivity is convenience.

But Christ came to set the captives free. Not to make captivity more comfortable. Not to manage your slavery with better medications or more engaging entertainment. He came to break the chains.

The cross is the instrument of liberation. Christ did not die to give us a coping mechanism. He died to give us freedom—real freedom, the freedom to choose the good, the freedom to love, the freedom to become who God created us to be.

This freedom costs something. It costs everything. It requires dying to the false self, to the enslaved self, to the self that serves pleasure and comfort and ease. It requires taking up your cross daily and following Him down the narrow road that few find.

The Addiction Economy will continue to profit from human misery until we refuse to be commodified. Until we recognize that what you give your attention to shapes your eternity. Until we understand that every click, every scroll, every purchase, every dose is a choice about who you serve.

So choose this day who you will serve. Because someone is already profiting from your habits. The only question is whether you will allow them to continue, or whether you will fight for your soul.

The battle is real. The enemy is powerful. The odds seem overwhelming. But greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world. Christ has already won the victory. He offers you the grace to claim it.

All you have to do is take His hand and let Him lead you out of captivity into the light.

Your chains are not freedom. Your slavery is not choice. And the God who created you for Himself is calling you home.

~by Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

© 2026 Texas Outlaw Press. All rights reserved.

https://texasoutlawpress.org