Buyer, Beware of Addiction

Abstract

Addictive products kill more than 700,000 people in the United States every year. Despite the large-scale risks that addiction poses, the law requires manufacturers of addictive products to disclose little-to-no information about the risk of addiction—the single most consequential characteristic of a class of products contributing to mass death every year. While consumers understand that addictive products are, in fact, addictive, they generally do not understand the magnitude of the addiction risks that they face. Metaphorically, consumers understand that they are playing a game of “Russian roulette” when they consume an addictive product—but they play without knowing how many bullets are in the gun. This Article considers how and why the law fails to require meaningful addiction risk disclosure. It goes on to discuss what meaningful risk disclosure might entail, including easily digestible quantitative measures of how likely addiction is, information about risky patterns of use, and warning signs of early-stage addiction. This Article suggests that an overhaul of the current approach to addiction research and disclosure is necessary to bring decades-old disclosure requirements in line with current medical research