Calculated Dependency

The word in this title is 'dependency', not the clinician's 'dependence' – and the choice is deliberate. What medicine describes as dependence, several industries have learned to treat as dependency: a reliable revenue stream, engineered into the adolescent reward system by design.
Across four industries – nicotine, caffeine and sugar, the attention economy, gambling mechanics in children's products – this book traces the same four-step blueprint: stimulus optimisation, early initiation, evidence management, regulatory delay. It documents the blueprint from the industries' own records, measures its consequences, names the gaps in German and European law that let it operate – and shows, at the example of Austria, that closing them is neither utopian nor expensive nor new.
This book documents how – and what Europe's legislators can do about it.