Fantastic Drug

Caution: may cause nausea, car crashes and feeling three feet thick.

"People dance all day long if they take the stuff? What a weird drug."

— Shunsaku Ban, Astro Boy

If you need an addictive or psychedelic substance for a storyline, there's always one old standby: make one up. This meshes perfectly with Speculative Fiction, but would seem completely out of place in a realistic series. After all, the planet "Yalic 4" might not have the same plants or minerals etc. that a fictional analogue of Earth would. Alternatively, if it's a comedy, you could get away with I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin! instead. Otherwise you can resort to the potentially narmy G-Rated Drug.

Aside from a writer's hesitancy to show a beloved character using drugs, Media Watchdogs often cracked down on any depiction of drugs (even if they were negative) for many years. Lately it's been reduced to "heavily sanctioned" at best, creating the unfortunate irony that incorrect portrayal of the effect of drugs has made audiences more liable to dismiss the true effects of drugs as propaganda.

In Real Life, these are known as "designer drugs", for people who want to get high without using technically illegal street drugs.

Often can be the Spice of Life. Compare Super Serum, Undiscriminating Addict. Not to be confused (usually) with Psycho Serum. Addictive Magic is closely related, as is A.I. Getting High. Compare Alien Catnip when a mundane substance proves a drug to aliens.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Kusuri’s family specializes in creating drugs that can do almost anything, from reversing aging to growing body parts to switching bodies, just to name a few.
• After God: Vollof has become addicted to some substance Alula made for him and can only think about getting more. Orokapi's venom helps with the withdrawal symptoms. It's so bad, when Alula asks between Orokapi and drugs, Vollof shamelessly picks drugs.
• Astro Boy: One episode has "Yellow Horse", an intravenous drug made from "Space Dust" that causes euphoria and compulsive dancing followed by horrible withdrawal pains. The gang that created it, the bizarre Phantom Club (a group of mostly space colonists dressed up in ridiculous ghost costumes), in typical over the top cartoon villain fashion, apparently intended to get the entire population of Earth addicted so they could take over the world.
• Banana Fish: The mysterious "banana fish" that everyone is searching for is actually a variant of LSD that can be used to brainwash someone into doing whatever they're ordered to do.
• Battle Angel Alita: A wide variety of new drugs are available, as is typical of futuristic dystopias.
• Beastars:
  • Bill the Tiger reveals that he dopes himself up on rabbit blood. In the world of Beastars, many carnivorous species struggle with their predatory instincts, and devouring another animal is considered the worst taboo: as such, rabbit blood is considered an illicit substance akin to steroids, as it stimulates predatory instincts. In addition, there are hidden "black markets" that sell illicit meat from hospitals and funeral homes for carnivores, with the implication that most carnivores are Functional Addicts who eat meat to keep their instincts in check and prevent themselves from killing others, while those who cave into their instincts descend into destructive behaviors, if not outright suicide.
  • Bears like Riz must take suppresants and drink honey to keep themselves from becoming Drunk with Power, though bears can suppress the urges through The Power of Friendship. Unfortunately, Riz takes it a bit too far when he's unable to control his uncontrolled strength when trying to reveal how strong he gets to Tem, who ends up getting devoured by Riz, who somehow thought eating Tem was the ultimate sign of friendship.
• Code Geass: A drug called Refrain causes the user to relive their fondest memories, making it especially popular among the downtrodden Japanese. It's also rather important to the plot in several places.
• Cowboy Bebop: Red Eye is a stimulant which is sprayed in the eye and grants incredibly fast reaction times and dissociation from reality. The first episode deals with a man trying to sell a stolen supply of Bloody Eye, a "purer" form of Red Eye.
• Darker than Black has a substance like this produced in the bodies of bees who have fed off flowers from the Gate.
• In the Dirty Pair OVA, there exists a drug called "Hustle", which promotes muscle growth and gives the user feelings of invincibility. Kei and Yuri have to face a rogue 3WA agent who's become a kingpin for the drug, and who is high on her own supply.
• Gunsmith Cats: Kerasine, a drug whose symptoms change with the dosage but also make people highly susceptible to suggestion. It's also what eventually gives Goldie Musou her Vetinari Job Security over the Chicago underworld — as she puts it, Kerasine is a perfect drug (a full list of how outrageous it is is on Artistic License – Chemistry for your perusal) and only she can supply it — or she can be arrested and Chicago goes back to its typical Mob War battlefield of feuding drug dealers. The heroes let her go.
• In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, the pilots of the Forbidden, Raider and Calamity Gundams are given doses of a drug called "Gamma Glipheptin". The drug gives them the reaction time and stamina to match and surpass Coordinators as well as a violent drive, but when the drug wears off, they suffer crippling withdrawal symptoms leading to their deaths as their bodies shut down - the perfect drug to keep them loyal to the Earth Alliance and their Blue Cosmos handlers.
• The "true wine" brewed by the Soma Familia in Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? is alcohol so impossibly delicious that a single sip leaves you addicted to it. This has led to the Soma Familia essentially devolving into an entire Familia of junkies, desperate to scrape up enough wine to afford their next fix. They even deliberately addict particularly promising up-and-coming adventurers so they'll bend their considerable fortunes and talents towards producing more of Soma's "true wine".
• One Piece:
  • The Big Bad of the Fishman Island arc uses this, as does his crew. It's called Energy Steroid and taking one pill doubles your strength... but also shortens your life. We see the full effects at the end when they age from their prime to weak old men just hours after the battle.
  • From the Punk Hazard arc, we also have NHC10, a highly addictive stimulant drug. It can be used as medicine, but only selected doctors in selected countries are allowed to use it. It only takes a small daily amount of it to be addicted, and its short-time withdrawal symptoms are pain and increased aggression. It's dangerous to the point that the characters who were shown to be addicted to it were writhing on the ground in agony, before going completely apeshit and attacking Luffy. Oh, and said addicted characters were kidnapped children who were experimented on by the Big Bad of the arc.
• Serial Experiments Lain: Accela, a powerful nanomachine-powered stimulant that causes Accela Bullet Time, heightened senses, and delusional thoughts. It also seems to physically link the user into the Wired, and susceptible to its more esoteric phenomena.
• Dirty O Id Man Happosai in Ranma ½ is so committed to lechery that the act of indulging in his perversions — groping women and playing with women's underwear — is physically necessary for him. He can literally replenish his depleted stamina by nuzzling a woman's breasts or rubbing a brassier or a set of panties, and if he goes too long without indulging, he rapidly gets weaker, to the point that people believe in-universe that he'd die if he spent too long without being perverted. He's even been outright described as addicted to his chosen perversions. Protagonist Ranma Saotome readily exploits his need for lecherous contact with women's bodies, as well as the corresponding fact that contact with men's underwear weakens Happosai.
• An episode of Silent Möbius deals with a drug known as Dommel, which is a very powerful performance-enhancing drug... with a tendency to mutate its users into hideous monsters before dissolving into a puddle of goo. It's extracted from the body of an demon from another dimension.
• In the Speed Racer episode "The Fastest Car on Earth," V Gas is a drug given to racers to improve their reflexes, allowing them to tame the GRX, an engine with incredible power. When the drug leaves the system, the user becomes terrified of even mild speeds.
• The Voynich Hotel features Mercero, a drug obtained from a marijuana-like plant. It can be smoked, with effects that appear to be much stronger than regular marijuana, and is very addictive, as one character has withdrawal symptoms quite soon after using up his supply and another is still showing symptoms years later.

Comic Books

• All Superheroes Must Die has 90s, which apparently causes people injected with it to explode after 90 seconds.
• So numerous in American Flagg! that the Comic Book Drug Reference has a separate appendix dedicated to fictional drugs appearing in the series.
• The magic potion in Asterix is mostly just Super Serum, but is played like this in a few stories where it's funnier. For instance, the druid who gives it to the villagers is named Getafix, athletes at the Olympic Games are banned from taking it, and in one story it's explicitly and repeatedly referred to as 'the dope' by a Roman trying to steal it. The official site also implies that it has some mild psychological effects, basically inducing childlike thought in people who drink it — explaining Obelix's strange personality and why even the more shrewd Gauls really enjoy beating people up on potion.
• A shot of "buz", from an early issue of Cerebus the Aardvark, is one hundred percent addictive and provides all the nutrition an adult needs in one day. A villain uses it to subjugate and rule his entire city.
• The DCU:
  • The Batman comics give us "Venom", a highly addictive "super-steroid" which gives the user incredible strength, alertness, and agility temporarily. When first introduced, Batman himself is using it as a way to cope with his imperfections. He soon realizes he's made a terrible mistake and must endure a horrific withdrawal before returning to normal. But Venom is most famous as the power source of Batman's enemy Bane, who wears a tank full of the stuff with tubes hooked up to his veins, giving him a constant, steady dose of Venom. The result is that he's incredibly strong (so much so that he once broke Batman's back — he got better) but totally dependent on the stuff, and Azrael eventually beat him by cutting off his supply.
    • The Joker uses a deadly poison called "Joker Venom" or "Smilex" that literally makes its victims laugh to death. Maxie Zeus (during one of his periods of sanity) diluted it with ecstasy and sold it as a recreational drug called Chuckles.
    • One Justice League of America arc mentioned that the Scarecrow has also gotten in on the act, selling a recreational version of his fear-inducing gas; signs of addiction include compulsively scratching one's nape. The same arc suggested that Psycho-Pirate has also somehow made a drug that can induce ecstasy.
    • The Red Hood storyline in Batman: Urban Legends features a drug called Cheerdrops, based on Scarecrow's fear gas, but with the opposite effect, similar to Snakebite in Batwoman (2019).
  • In The Flash and Teen Titans, one of Vandal Savage's businesses is selling Velocity-9, a drug that gives the users superspeed. And then they burn out and die.
  • In the "Five Years Later" version of Legion of Super-Heroes, a character is revealed to be taking ProFem, a drug that turns men into women, but the change is only maintained if the drug is taken regularly.
  • In the Superman titles:
    • D.M.N. is a drug that turns the user into a demon. It was created by Lord Satanus.
    • In The Third Kryptonian, Karsta Wor-Ul grows alien medicinal plants in his yard. She smokes a Bolenthi herb for pain relief, but some human teenagers stole and smoked her crops. It made them super-strong... and crazy.
    • Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow: Red Kryptonite has apparently come into common use in the galaxy as a kind of hallucinogen in pill form, known as Red-K. One user justifies his possession of it as for anxiety during travel. Supergirl states that for Kryptonians the hallucinations to their bodies just happen to become real.
• Deep Sea: Sludge. In the world of the comic, its intended use is as a source of energy, one that has allowed the world's technology to jump forward by leaps and bounds. However, it has an interesting effect on humans when it's rubbed into their skin. Ambar describes the feeling to Ambar.
  Amber: At first it takes your breath away like jumping in ice water. But then you start to fall away... into the deep. And you're in a cave. You're connected to the world. Like the world depends on you. Siphoning your spirit away. Once you're completely empty, that's when you're finally at peace. People call that The Hollow. In The Hollow you understand that no matter what you do... it doesn't matter. Sludge is real. Sludge is about feeling the world.
• Adam Warren's comic adaptation of Dirty Pair features several fantastic drugs, this being a future filled with transhuman technology. Wardrugs are implants that inject a tranquilizing cocktail into the blood after a serious injury. At one point Kei gets her leg half blown off and starts "glanding" Wardrugs. She identifies "no-shock" and "happy juice", the latter of which makes her very giggly. There is also a chemweapon called "Proust-in-a-Can", which places the victim into a coma while they are locked into re-experiencing a distant memory.
• The Dregs: The homeless population of this Vancouver is addicted to Listo, which is depicted as a bright green substance that's injected into the body.
• ElfQuest has "dreamberries", a fantastic equivalent to grapes that are eaten when fermented for their mildly intoxicating effects — they can also can be fermented into a primitive but far more potent liquor. In the Russian version, they're called "Drunkberries".
• Love and Lust are considered this to Cubi and Cupids, respectively, in Fine Print — imbibing them is compared to shooting up with heroin. Arcubi have made it a rule for the other cubi not to do so because of how addictive it can be.
• In a March 2015 story arc, Flare encounters Darkdust, which apparently turns people into Eldritch Abominations.
• Forgotten Realms has the cheeeese. To most races it's a disgusting but otherwise unremarkable cheese, but to halflings it's a powerful and addictive drug. Foxy Cardluck was once hooked on cheeeese by an unscrupulous human mage, who forced Cardluck and other halflings to do all sorts of nefarious things for him by rationing their cheeeese supply.
• The Invisibles has the "Key" series of drugs (Key 17, Key 23) that cause people to hallucinate and mistake words for the thing they describe. Having been told he was infected with a flesh-eating virus, someone is tortured by being shown a hand mirror with a post-it saying "diseased face"; a villain drops to her knees, sobbing with regret and begging forgiveness in front of a "world's greatest dad" mug; and one of the Big Bads explodes when a flag-gun saying "Bang!" unfurls in front of him.
• Judge Dredd:
  • The drug Stookie can physically undo the effects of aging and prolong life to the point of virtual immortality. The problem is that it's made by killing and harvesting glands of a sapient alien race, the Stookies, that have heart attacks at the slightest things (similar to fainting goats). Naturally, stookie glanding is completely illegal and people who deal in it are dealt with in Dredd's normal manner (most of them wind up dead). So do most of the Stookies he's trying to save. It's unclear if Stookie is innately addictive in its own right, or if users might as well be addicted because they revert to their actual age extremely quickly once the drug wears off, which mostusers are understran
  • Umpty is a candy which is simply so extremely delicious that anyone who eats it develops an instant psychological addiction to it and will do anything to gain more Umpty to eat. Because it lacks a clear biochemical side to the addiction, it has proven very difficult to develop treatments to wean addicts.
• In a few issues of Knuckles the Echidna, a substance called Lemon Sundrop Dandelion was hidden in hot dogs at an amusement park. After eating the dog most characters would begin tripping balls, though Charmy's friend Mello died of an overdose and Charmy himself almost did as well.
• Taduki from the Allan Quartermain novels (see below) also features in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and Allan is hooked on it. While it was a thinly-disguised version of opium in the original it's actually opium in this one. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century: 1969 also has the drug of choice in Swinging London as "Tadukic Acid" (or "taddies") instead of LSD.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Mutant Growth Hormone, or MGH, induces a temporary genetic shift in the user, giving them superpowers. It also fucks you up good.
  • All-New Ultimates: There is a drug lab ran by former employees of Roxxon. They made a drug that give people superpowers, but it is untested, and more often than not it gives useless or harming superpowers. The lab was then seized by a street gang, the Serpent Skulls.
  • Marvel 2099's line of comics in the early-to-mid '90s had quite a few examples of this:
    • Rapture was a legal designer drug developed by (and exclusive to) the Alchemax corporation that would be distributed to employees in order to keep them loyal to the company. A "very high-powered, mind-expanding hallucinogen", it causes the user to feel perfectly calm and collected... unless he tries to fight the drug's effects, in which case it causes him to hallucinate wildly, "seeing monsters everywhere". It also bonds with the user's DNA in short order, becoming so addictive that "you need it the way you need air to breathe". Geneticist Miguel O'Hara, who would become the Spider-Man of 2099, was slipped the drug by his boss when Miguel tried to quit the company. He tried to rid his system of Rapture by rewriting his own genetic code using a stored file of his genome which he'd been using for experiments. Things didn't go as planned, and Miguel ended up with spidery traits in his DNA as a result.
    • A similar drug, Rhapsody, was mentioned in an issue of X-Men 2099, in which it was revealed that the Synthia corporation secretly laced its food products with the drug, so that consumers would become addicted to eating Synthia food, at the expense of their health.
    • Chameleon 2099 turned out to be a drug rather than a person, which not only manipulated a user's DNA, but also allowed him to shapeshift (either partially or completely) into whatever animal happened to suit the user's mindset at the time of taking the drug. Users have been seen assuming the characteristics of animals like bulls, mice, felines, and dogs. It was an Alchemax-designed drug, but "unstable even by their standards" to the point that users often die painfully from the toll it takes on their systems.
    • Chain is one of the most illegal of drugs in that era. In 2099 A.D. Genesis, it was revealed that the legislation on Chain had been upgraded from a "thirty-year stretch" (being physically aged by three decades) for possession to a "death penalty" for even having it on one's person. In his only appearance in the 2099 comics, the Daredevil of that era planted a dime bag of Chain on a drug dealer just to make sure the dealer never pushes drugs again. At the time, the dealer had been peddling a drug laced with "a rider chemical" that "causes communicable sterility". In short, Daredevil signed a drug dealer's death warrant for trying to "kill all birth in Downtown."
    • Perhaps the most bizarre example was found in X-Nation #1. The main characters, a group of teenagers living at the Xavier Institute for Indigent Children, had slipped away to a bar and try a unique hallucinogen: milk. They attached diodes to their foreheads; drinking milk stimulated their brains into producing bizarre hallucinations. But as one of them insisted, "'s really good f'r your bones an' teeeeeth."
  • During Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men, Xavier and his staff have to contend with Hypercortisone D (or "Kick"), a highly addictive stimulant that boosts mutant abilities. Emma Frost describes the high as making one feel both "angelic and violently insane for five hours". It is eventually revealed that Kick is actually small portions of the sentient microbial colony Sublime and allows Sublime to influence or even control its users' actions.
  • The mutant celebrity team X-Statix had several custom drugs that helped to support their ultra-self-destructive lifestyles. U-Go Girl, for instance, took at least two different stimulants to counteract the extreme fatigue that her powers caused her, one of which was Kick as featured in New X-Men. There was also a drug that many on the team used to instantly purge themselves of alcohol so that they could go straight from parties to missions. It was implied that this latter drug had terrible effects with long-term use, but since the average lifespan of an X-Statix member was only a few years at best, nobody really worried about it.
• Monstress has Dream Tar, a fantasy analogue to opium which causes feelings of euphoria and seeing visions. Unfortunately, Arcanics are easily hooked on it. Because it was the cats that introduced the plant that is the main ingredient for Dream Tar, many Arcanics hate cats, believing the cats had done so to purposely hook them on the drug.
• Pouvoirpoint: Various drugs with psychedelic effects are inhaled using a narghile, including a narcotic from Venus called PXL (which literally pixilates you), and Demoulax, which plunges the main character into highly hallucinatory dreams. During New Year's Eve, pills called En-fêtes are available at the buffet, producing mild effects on the speech bubbles spoken by the characters (one will have reversed text, another will have hairy speech bubbles...).
• The Appalachian town of Silk Hills is home to moth dust, an intense psychoactive hallucinagen made, possibly entirely, from the poisonous scales of a local species of moth. Townies are known to lace their weed with it for recreational use, but the moths' underground nests are absolutely covered in the stuff, causing random, unexpected hallucinations and traumatic flashbacks. Celia, when completely covered with moths, hallucinates an encounter with a divine moth being.
• Goloka root in Tom Strong increases human strength and intelligence when consumed regularly in small quantities but has hallucinogenic effects if larger doses are taken.
• The Top 10 universe has several strange drugs.
  • "Goose Juice", i.e., mongoose blood, which (in reference to the fifth-string Golden Age Marvel Comics superhero named the Whizzer) induces Super-Speed.
  • "Pixie Dust", that gives hallucinations so vivid that other people can see them, usually of brightly colored pixies.
  • A more dramatic version is xenite, which is basically amphetamine, but laced with a number of radioactive compunds which enabled it to affect even generally invulnerable supers.
• Transmetropolitan:
  • There are several "future drugs" that protagonist Spider Jerusalem ingests, injects, and generally crams into every orifice. As noted in the Quotes section, among these is Mechanics, a nanotech drug that slowly turns your body into a cyborg system that turns addiction into a protocol.
  • When Spider moves into an apartment, he finds his appliances are drug addicts. Someone went to the trouble of developing a drug that an A.I. can have plugged into its mainframe. (Those Cool Shades of his were made because his Maker was high at the time.)
• In Undertown, sugar is treated like a drug. Eating too much of it causes people to hallucinate and it might be addictive on some level. The first volume even features a "sugar bar" which seems to function somewhere between a normal bar and an opium den.
• Watchmen had "Katies" (from KT-28, possibly a derivative of Ketamine), a type of drug often used by the Top-Knot gangs. It should be noted that this was not so much about avoiding naming real life drugs, but establishing that culture was divergent in this reality given the influence of Dr. Manhattan. Ordinary drugs such as marijuana and cocaine are also mentioned.

Fan Works

• Adventures of the Morning Star, like its source material, has the drug Shimmer. It turns people and rats into monsters that do whatever Singed and Silco say.
• In Back to Zero, there is an illegal recreational drug made of Pokémon stun spore. Some people also smoke elements of plant Pokémon, such as Oddish leaves.
• Empath: The Luckiest Smurf has a bunch of fictional drugs:
  • Smurfnip is treated the same as pot with the attendant Marijuana Is LSD trope. A telltale way to know that someone is stoned on smurfnip is that the whites of their eyes turn green.
  • Pixie dust, as seen with a Smurf in a Mirror Universe and normal Vanity in "The High Cost Of Smurfing" inhaling it, is their analog to cocaine as well as scopolamine ("Devil's Breath").
  • There's also psychelium, a drug that the Psyches are forced to use to inhibit emotional expression.
  • There's glowberries, which gives hallucinations when eaten along with a sour stomach and a bad case of "smurfarrhea".
  • There's dumdum flowers, whose pollen makes whoever sniffs it both high and stupid.
  • There's the buzz bean, which is their equivalent to coffee with really high caffeine levels.
  • There's stinkweed, which is their analog to tobacco.
  • And there's moonberries, which cause the Smurfs to start eating the roofs of their mushroom houses, thinking that they have hidden magical properties that can cause hallucinations.
• Fallout: Equestria: Littlepip gets addicted to Mint-als, especially of the Party Time variety. By chapter 20, she gets over her addiction (unlike Pinkie Pie, who was also addicted to these), flushing down her remaining Party Time Mint-als (which were a lot, mind you) down the toilet.
• In Season 5 of The Flash Sentry Chronicles, a group of ponies use a device called a "Cutie Marker" to change their cutie marks and their talents. It's revealed that while the device can change a pony's cutie mark and talent, it's also highly addictive, and can lead to a pony having violent fits of rage. Their origins are revealed in Grand Hoof: The Legend Begins, when the titular character had fought against a pony who had introduced the Cutie Markers to Equestria and sought to sell them, claiming that they were the next step in ponykind's evolution.
• In the Heat Guy J Slash Fic "In a Different Light", there are three such drugs mentioned. All are evidently connected with Rave culture. The first is a very addictive one called "Black Tab", which can lead to extreme suggestibility and/or hallucinations.^note  Possibly, it contains scopolamine or some derivative thereof, which is known to produce those effects. The second is called "Celestial Blue", which appears to be some hybrid of MDMA and heroin in terms of its effects. The third is called "Virgin's Blood", which is stated to be a dilute form of MDMA dissolved in a red syrup containing various aphrodisiacs, and is often taken with other drugs (such as Celestial Blue) that inhibit sexual performance.
• In Origin Story, it turns out that the reason why Captain Marvel is willingly working with Hydra as they subvert the American government is because they hooked her on a drug that was manufactured from the Puppet Master's mind-control clay, and the addiction is so strong that she's willing to sell out her friends and her country if doing so guarantees her access to the drug.
• In A Prize for Three Empires, the alien race Aakon make alcoholic beverages and drugs specifically designed according to the customer's tastes.
• In RWBY ABRG, the Schnees are involved in the drug trade. Dust, which is usually for weapons, is often used recreationally.
• In RWBY Alternate, there are drugs laced with dust (as in, the fictional substance used in RWBY). These are illegal everywhere except for Atlas, who legalized them in an attempt to boost the economy. These drugs are largely illegal precisely because they often lead to people exploding due to dust poisoning. A lot of these drugs are practical rather than recreational, such as "gills", which allow people to hold their breath underwater for longer periods, and "floaties", which allow people to jump higher.
• Take a Stand: "Morrigan" is a performance enhancer derived from Night Howler serum, used in illegal pit fights.
• Trade Winds: The mushroom cure used in Temeraire's canon to cure the dragon plague doubles as a drug akin to peyote when stewed into a serum, and is given to William Laurence and Desmond Miles to enhance their Eagle Vision and place them in contact with their Assassin ancestors.
• The Triptych Continuum has several.
  • Wake-up juice is the only legal Fantastic Drug we've seen in the Continuum so far. We don't know exactly what it is, save that it's most definitely not coffee, it appears as a creamy yellow liquid, and it's made from plants. It wakes ponies up and keeps them awake.
  • Exam Crystal is made from the same plants as wake-up juice, grown in the heart of a wild zone and charged to bursting with magic. It makes a pony more awake than they've ever been in their lives, but the duration is unreliable and there's a choice of two random after-effects: either become about 30% more tired than you were before taking it, or pass out until every bit of rest missed has been made up for — even if that means days in a hospital bed. Users have their irises turn yellow until the Crystal wears off.
  • Chemical-herbal Booster Drugs are available for unicorns and pegasi, providing one of the only ways to increase field strength — temporarily: most mixes last about fifteen minutes. Boosts range from five to fifty percent of the user's original power, and the higher the percentage, the more strain the pony is putting on their body: post-dose death caused by the most potent mixes can and does occur. Most versions have visible side effects, no race can take a drug meant for another without getting sick, and no mixes are publically known which work for earth ponies.
  • Chapter 12 of A Mark Of Appeal adds another: Redtinge is a derivative of the pollen of a rare flower that grows in a handful of places in Mazein. Just being in close proximity can get it into any creature's system, and once in the system it never leaves and gradually but continually amplifies the victim's magic. In minotaurs, this grants greater and greater strength, until after a few months their bodies give out. In ponies, it amplifies the pony's cutie mark talent until it consumes their mind and life. Fortunately, a cure is eventually found; the root of that self-same plant.
  • The spin-off story Anchor Foal adds Putaverunt Dolore, or "thought pain". It is a powerful poison which can be made by blending together three different parts of three different plants (leaves from one, petals from a second, and flowers from a third). It causes debilitating but survivable pain to sapient beings, but causes swift and painless death in non-sapient creatures. As such, vets across Menajeria use it to euthanize animals.
• A Young Girl's Guerrilla War: Once stuck in a position of leadership, Tanya's magic becomes this: constant use of mental stimulation spells results in something similar to wartime usage of amphetamines due to her refusal to take any time off.

Film — Animated

• In 9, The Big Guy 8 is at one point seen holding a magnet over his head, making his eyes go all fuzzy in a Does This Remind You of Anything? way; presumably, it messes up the electronics in his head.
• Green Lantern: First Flight: Sinestro uses a pink orb of some kind as an "incentive" to get Labella to talk. She doesn't mind at first, but begs for him to stop after he ties it to her hands.
• The "So Beautiful, So Dangerous" segment of Heavy Metal shows two alien starship pilots getting wasted on a white powder they identify as "plutonium nyborg" and then flying home utterly stoned. The drug is a white powder dispensed from a device that heavily resembles a floor-polishing machine. Evidently, it's more fun to take if the imbiber draws weird patterns on the floor to snort up. "NOSEDIVE!"
• The Edison balls from Rock and Rule, similar to Orb in Sleeper. You wait and wait for someone to say "I'm trippin' balls!" Notably there are also real drugs used: Mok smokes marijuana and snorts cocaine, and at Club 666 a druggie has "uppers and downers".
• Strange Frame features a scene where protagonists Parker and Naia get high on a selection of futuristic designer drugs.
• The Night Howlers from Zootopia are this.

Film — Live-Action

• The Adult Version of Jekyll and Hide: Leeder's formula works wonders
• Antopia: The ants have antwax, which Jerry is addicted to. The Spin-Off shows that antwax is taken through an "antwax vape".
• Attack of the Clones has death sticks, something which the writers of the Holonet News promo had some fun with. The Star Wars Expanded Universe features harder drugs such as ryll and glitterstim (which was, incidentally, the "spice" that Han used to smuggle for Jabba the Hutt).
• Banshee Chapter has DMT-19, a hallucinogen created by the government for MK-ULTRA style experiments. The chemical formula is broadcast from an extra-dimensional Numbers Station, and taking it lets you perceive and interact with the beings presumably running it. It works both ways, though — and given this is a Lovecraft-inspired cosmic horror movie that's a very bad thing.
• Barbarella: At one point, Barbarella smokes "essence of man" (made by trapping a guy in a giant hookah). She only smokes briefly before getting caught by the villains, so we don't see the effects.
• The Batman (2022) features a drug with the street name of "drops" as a central plot element.
• Batman Forever: Ed Nygma's invention, the "Mind Blender" a.k.a. the Box, which allows him to suck the neural energy of everybody watching TV with the thing. Taking hits from Nygma's machine is apparently quite addictive. The Riddler himself spends hours on a stylized throne shaped like "The Thinker", jittering like a coke fiend as he sucks up more energy.
• Class of 1999 has Edge, which is what the high school students of that time period (as well as Cody and Angel's mother) use to get their highs. Cody, the film's main protagonist, refuses to use any of it.
• The main plot of Dredd involves stopping the distribution of a new street drug called "Slo-Mo" which causes the user to experience time at a fraction of its normal speed.
• Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype: A weight loss drug makes you pucker. It also makes Heckyl handsom (and vicious).
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Adrenochrome, which is a real compound, but its effects and method of production are fictionalized.
• The Happytime Murders has sugar act this way for puppets. The drug dealer stereotype deals in hard candy so strong that it will send humans into diabetic shock.
• Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man has Crystal Dream: "...what it is, you don't shoot it, you don't smoke it, you don't snort it. Apparently, you put it in your eyes, and it tells you lies."
• I Come in Peace features an alien drug "collector" who overdoses humans with stolen heroin so that he can extract endorphins from them for sale off-world.
• The hero of Limitless, a hapless writer with no initiative, receives a mysterious drug called NZT that turns him into a genius.
• Looper features an unnamed designer drug administered via eye drops. It appears to cause awful withdrawal symptoms.
• The nootropic drug CPH4 from Lucy is a synthetic version of a fetal compound produced by pregnant mothers. In small doses, it gives quite the kick. Lucy's extremely large dose gives her superpowers but will also surely kill her.
• Minority Report has "neuroin", dispensed from futuristic inhalers. The Precogs were born due to their parents' use of neuronin at the time of conception/during pregnancy.
• Hypnocil is a dream suppressant from the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. It's useful as a defense against Freddy's attacks but is later shown to pose a serious risk of rendering patients comatose.
• Repo! The Genetic Opera: GeneCo, the company that makes artificial organs and cosmetic surgery, also sells a highly addictive painkiller called Zydrate that is used in its surgeries. It comes in a little glass vial^note A little glass vial? and glows blue. Lovable Rogue Graverobber sells black market Zydrate that he extracts from the brains of corpses.
• RoboCop 2 has "Nuke", which is "injected" via disposable eyedrop vials. There is a cult based around the drug. It is implied that the drug is playing off of or countering negative emotions made by the brain's chemistry. Nuke actually comes in a number of different varieties, including Red Ramrod, White Noise, Black Thunder and Blue Velvet.
• The key to Sexual Chemistry's plot is a drug that not only transform the user into the opposite sex, but makes them younger, grows their hair and nails (and massive breasts), and epilates their body. It also seems to apply makeup. Given that the formula involved input from someone who's specifically stated to be a witch, the writers evidently had to admit that this looked more like magic than science.
• Sleeper has "Orb", a silver sphere that makes the handler feel giddy and laugh uncontrollably when it's touched or rubbed. Great for parties!
• Snowpiercer has Kronol, an industrial waste that two of the protagonists as well as some of the upper class rave about in a world where even cigarettes are extinct. Because of its highly flammable properties, the stuff is also used to make a makeshift bomb.
• Played with in Transformers (2007) when a police detective accuses Sam of partaking in "mojo", which he assumes is a designer drug. "Mojo" is the name of the family's chihuahua, and the drugs are said dog's painkillers.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past: Xavier being dependent on his medicine, and suffering intense pain from his powers returning when he stops taking it, is about the closest a PG-13 film can come to depicting the effects of drug abuse and withdrawal.

Literature

• Alice, Girl from the Future features a planet which is a slum, with no one caring about anything around them. Turns out a few years ago someone invented pills allowing time travel. Naturally, everyone spends as much time as possible reliving the best moments of his life. The future can be traveled to as well, but people are afraid to.
• In Alien in a Small Town, kreg is an alien virus. The human body can fight off the infection, but the user experiences a hallucinogenic high until it does; and the user's body does not gain a lasting immunity, so subsequent use will give a longer and longer high until the user may eventually be trapped in a hallucinogenic state lasting for days.
• The Anno Dracula universe has "drac", which is made of powdered vampire blood and temporarily gives humans vampire abilities.
• Bazil Broketail: Bazil is drugged by Thrembode in the first book with the fumes of Vermillion Swinebane, a fictional fungus which causes dragons to lose their minds. He gets saved by a remedy.
• The Black Company: Mushrooms growing on a golem's body have a euphoric effect. The consumers start singing or laughing for no reason and stop feeling both tired and hungry.
  Sleepy: This stuff could get addictive.
• Bordertown has a river (the Mad River, aptly enough) of this stuff, which, oddly, produces edible fish which are a bit freaky but don't cause intoxication. There's also "dragon's milk", which is a drug for elves but just makes humans sick, and the drug in Finder which supposedly turns its users into elves... needless to say, it doesn't work.
• Soma in Brave New World is the ideal recreational drug. There is a Real Life drug of the same name, but it's clearly not the same substance.
• Jason Sean Ridler's Brimstone Files has the Black Lotus from the second novel, appropriately titled Black Lotus Kiss — a supernatural plant from the goddess Tiamat that was supposed to be extinct since the age of the Cimmerian Kings. One is found by a pharmaceutical company that uses it to create a steroid-like drug which makes users gain muscle almost instantly. It also had a side-effect of granting a Healing Factor. Unfortunately, it also causes the heart muscles to lethally expand and gives its users a temper worse than "roid rage".
• In Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley's Bring Me The Head Of Prince Charming trilogy, demons, angels, witches, and other supernatural beings drink a substance called ichor in lieu of alcohol. Ichor is also shown to have a raft of other possible uses, most notably as a magical preservative. It is also implied that a number of the more esoteric alchemical ingredients can double as drugs, particularly "black hellebore", which is noted to both stunt your growth and give your hairy palms.
• In A Brother's Price, so-called "crib drugs" are used to keep men able and willing to have sex. One of those drugs is, apparently, called "Everlast". It is implied that making men last longer is not the only effect, though; they seem to also act as an aphrodisiac.
• The Butterfly Kid has the "reality pill", a psychedelic which causes hallucinations that physically manifest. The alien invaders plan to use it to cause chaos. Unfortunately for them, our heroes are hippies who know how to handle their drugs...
• The Chosen and the Beautiful: The well-connected speakeasy crowd in this magical version of The Roaring '20s add a drop of demon blood to their cocktails for an extra kick.
• Circle of Magic has "dragonsalt" in Magic Steps. It's so addictive that trading in it is a capital offense. It has extremely stimulating effects, which handily counteracts the lethargy caused by Unmagic.
• Lemon sap in Clockwork Century is distilled from a Deadly Gas and is highly addictive. The worst part, however, is that extended consumption turns the user into a rotting, flesh-eating zombie.
• A Clockwork Orange (and its film adaptation) features substances like "synthemesc" (presumably mescaline or a close analogue), "drencrom" (presumably adrenochrome) and "vellocet" (given the resemblance to "velocity", probably "speed"-like amphetamines), all normally mixed into milk (thus why it's called ""milk plus", as in milk plus whatever you put in it).
• In Coda (2013), the Corp's music is this. You can even overdose on it if you're not careful.
• In The Courts of the Morning, part of the Big Bad's scheme depends on a drug called "asturas", derived from a rare plant found in a particular South American mountain range, which has exactly the properties required to make the plot work.
• In The Dark Profit Saga, healing potions are a fantastic drug that's essential for adventurers... and also highly addictive. They do exactly what they claim to do, which is heal wounds, but they also provide a general sense of "feeling good" as wounds are healed, resulting in some people becoming "healing junkies", desperate to get their next healing potion, and willing to hurt themselves, sometimes badly, so that it works that much better. Kaitha is one such addict, and the narrative doesn't have to go far to show how dangerous the addiction is to everyone around her.
• From the beginning of Deryni, drugs figure among the limitations on Deryni powers:
  • Merasha is a drug that severely disables Deryni, with nausea, dizziness, blackouts, and severely disorienting psychedelic effects on the brain that prevent the drugged person from concentrating (a requirement for the use of Deryni powers). In ordinary humans, it only produces a mild drowsiness. In earlier times, Deryni were exposed to it as part of their training; after the persecutions began, knowledge of it, like so much else, became fragmented and contradictory. It does appear quite frequently in The Deryni Chronicles and The Histories of King Kelson, and arrangements are made to expose Kelson and Dhugal to it in a controlled setting so they can learn to recognize it and mitigate its effects.
  • The climax of High Deryni involves the use of two such drugs, though they are not explicitly named. One is a very slow poison (said to take at least a day to kill) which also prevents Deryni from using their powers, and the other is an "antidote" which slows the initial symptoms of the first but hastens its end result.
• Dinner at Deviant's Palace features a drug with the street name "Blood" (it's a reddish-brown powder that makes people think of dried blood) that's reputed to give the user a sense of warmth, happiness, and freedom from care. It turns out that one of the key ingredients is, in fact, human blood, harvested from the victims of a psychic vampire.
• Discworld:
  • The troll drug Slab is ammonium chloride cut with radium and is a hallucinogen — but only if you're a troll. It also makes their brains melt.
  • There's a long list of drugs in The Truth, some of which are genuine street names for real drugs, some of which sound like they might be street names for real drugs, and a couple of which are established as variants on Slab in Thud!. These variants include Scrape (called so because you scrape the remains of Slab you have and cook it with pigeon droppings and alcohol. Also, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel), and Slide, which seems to be an ersatz for crack and PCP.
  • Snuff introduces Crystal Slam, an even-worse narcotic that's implied to literally make trolls' heads explode.
• In Distress, the recreational drug of choice in future Earth is a synthetic compound that produces the fun effects of drunkenness with none of the unpleasant side-effects, is impossible to overdose on, and isn't addictive.
• The wizard Aurelianus in The Drawing of the Dark smokes dried snakes cured with "herbs and spices". He claims the fumes are beneficial.
• Dreamblood in the Dreamblood Duology is needed to perform narcomancy and the Gatherers, chosen priests of Hananja, set out each night to gather it from those whose time has come to pass into Ina-Karekh, but it also is highly addictive. Any Gatherer who detects an untoward need for dreamblood within himself may request to be gathered in turn, and should he fail to do so in time and forcefully gather someone to sate his need, he will become Drunk on the Dark Side, turning him into a Reaper.
• The Dresden Files:
  • The "ThreeEye" in Storm Front is supposed to give its users second sight. Harry is skeptical until a junkie notices a rather nasty psychic scar of his. It turns out that it actually does work; it's a potion mass-produced by an Evil Sorcerer after he realized that it was addictive. Harry also notes that regardless of any other circumstances, the drug will result in insanity more often than not, as anything seen with Second Sight can never be forgotten. Wizards are trained on how to handle that. Mundanes are not.
  • Red Court vampire saliva contains an addictive narcotic, which helps them keep control of their victims.
  • The series also contains a Mundane Fantastic/Alien Catnip drug: dew drop faeries looooove pizza. Except for Lacuna in Cold Days. She's a Granola Girl.
• A full list of fictional drugs found in Dune would take up most of this page. The most important one is Spice, aka Melange. Melange is is highly desired not for recreational purposes, but because of its geriatric (life-extending) properties, and its ability to trigger precognition and other advanced mental abilities in specially trained individuals — abilities that are necessary for safe Faster-Than-Light Travel within the universe. Because of this, and the fact that it cannot be artificially synthesized, the entire economy of the Dune universe is centered around it. Word of God is that it's also an analogy for the importance of petrol/crude oil in the real world.
• Eddie and the Gang with No Name: One of these, called "Crush", becomes a critical plot point in The Seagulls Have Landed. A whole gang war is going on over the stuff.
• Empire of the Vampire: Sanctus is a powder made from extracted vampire blood, smoked through a pipe by the Silversaints in order to slake their own thirst for human blood and boost their own powers before going into battle. Vampiric blood itself is highly addictive and repeated consumption renders one enthralled to the undead from which it came. To avoid this, and dull its potency in general, the blood is distilled and powdered, and only smoked once a day at most, usually during evening mass. Even so, sanctus is incredibly potent and almost as addictive, with the highs it provides to the palebloods unlike any other sensual experience, and sooner of later, all Silversaints will wind up completely dependant upon it.
  Gabriel de León: “There’s an art to smoking sanctus. Hold the flame too close, the blood will burn. Hold it too far, it’ll melt too slow, liquefying rather than vaporizing. But get it right… God Almighty, get it right, and it’s magik. A bright red bliss, filling every inch of your sky... Words can’t describe it. You might as well try to explain a rainbow to a blind man. Imagine the moment, that first second you slip between a lover’s thighs. After an hour or more of worship at the altar, when everything else has run its course and there’s naught but want for you in her eyes and finally she whispers that magic word … please... Take that heaven and multiply it a hundredfold. You might be close.”
• In The Expanse, spaceship occupants take a special drug, colloquially called "the juice", when preparing for high-speed maneuvers. This drug is a mixture of various blood thinners, blood vessel reinforcers, adrenaline, and other stimulants that provide protection to internal organs against the crushing gravitational forces of a high-speed boost. While it works exceptionally well for that purpose, it's also dreaded by everyone that uses it, as the comedown effect is debilitating at best.
• Expiration Date revolves around a secret subculture who capture ghosts and inhale them to retain their youth. The trade in "smokes" as depicted bears a lot of resemblance to the covert trade in other things people inhale illicitly.
• In Fallen Empire, the character Yumi Moon grows a lot of plants for use as recreational drugs, including the hallucinogenic Rioters. In the Kindle Worlds novella "Ten Davids Two Goliaths" set in this world, one character uses Rioters for religious purposes and experiences the equivalent of an acid flashback at a very bad time.
• The Forever Watch has Psyn, which boosts psionic powers but also causes madness in long-term users. It's practically the only thing on the Noah that's actually illegal (while you can't get actual cocaine or heroin, you can purchase memories of what it feels like to use them).
• The Green-Sky Trilogy has Wissenberries, also known as Sacred Berries, or just Berries. A narcotic with both medicinal and recreational uses, the Kindar also use it as a means of social self-control, even giving it to kids to quiet them down in class (Zilpha Keatley Snyder was a schoolteacher, and the use of pharmaceuticals to make kids quiet and obedient is Older than You Think). Addicts are called "Berry-dreamers". It's never outright said that Berries cause the dreaded "wasting" disease, but people with the wasting tend to eat a lot of Berries, even when they won't eat anything else. Those who are really hardcore can try pavo-berries, which come from a "parasitic shrub" and will kill the user sooner rather than later.
• Hammer's Slammers has "stim cones" that are used to inject a variety of stimulants that keep people, such as the titular mercenaries, awake for long periods of time. In The Sharp End, a team from the Slammers evaluates two drug cartels planning a Mob War that sell a stim called "Gauge", which also seems to be hallucinogenic when mixed with by-products of the refinement process, as potential clients. The survey team has an attack of conscience when they see what the cartels have done to the planet where they grow the drug and try to manipulate them into wiping each other out... until the government has enough and hires the company to finish them off.
• The Han Solo Trilogy:
  • Spice, which has various types and is highly restricted, thus very profitable for smuggling. Glitterstim, the most powerful kind, can give a user telepathy temporarily as well.
  • There's the Exultation as well, which isn't an actual substance but in fact the mating call male t'landa Til use with a drug-like effect on members of other species. It is equally addictive though, and used to hook "pilgrims" in their fake religion on Ylesia.
• In the Harry Potter series, the usages or effects of potions common in the Wizarding World are sometimes loosely analogous to mundane drugs. Harry is warned that heavy users of the luck potion, Felix felicis, can become hopeless addicts.
• Subverted in House of Leaves. One of the writers/editors, Johnny Truant, of the story-within-a-story claims in one of the footnotes/journal entries that he visited an old friend, who was a doctor, on one of his journeys. During his visit Johnny told the doctor about night terrors and screaming in his sleep, the doctor gave him a "yellow pill". Afterwords the dreams stopped and slept more peacefully. It was suddenly revealed that the Journal entries were faked by Johnny to make himself believe that his life was better than it actually was in the duration of the writing, painfully subverting the trope.
• The House of Shattered Wings: Angels' bones can be ground up and made into an addictive drug. Gangs hunt newly fallen angels to harvest the bones, and a main character (Madeleine) is an addict.
• Humanx Commonwealth includes Bloodhype, which must have fantastic marketing to ever sell, given that one dose is addictive — and withdrawal is fatal.
• The Hunger Games has morphling, a futuristic drug with probably heroin-like effects due to its name being derived from morphine, another opiate. The psychotic ex-Tribute Johanna has an addiction to it.
• Hurog: In Dragon Bones, Muellen, the mother of the protagonist, is drugged most of the time. One of her favorites is "dreamroot", but she also has other plants in her garden. It's what happens when a botanist becomes severely depressed — she was a well-adjusted, but delicate soul in Ward's childhood. Then her abusive husband became too much to bear, and she started seeking solace in the psychoactive plants in her garden. She doesn't seem to be quite there even when she's not drugged, having effectively fled reality and turned herself into a full-time Cloudcuckoolander.
• Spaceoline from "I'm in Marsport Without Hilda" is an anti-spacesickness drug. The first dozen trips you make in space always make people ill, but Spaceoline prevents the illness without malign side-effects. The benign ones include relaxation, free-word association, and politely taking turns in a conversation. It's also completely addiction-free. Spaceoline can be altered into a different drug that is highly addictive. The alterations needed can be found using household chemicals. The Galactic Service has been suppressing this information because otherwise suppressing Spaceoline would be effectively suppressing space travel.
• AUM from the Illuminatus! trilogy, alongside a whole pharmacy of real drugs.
• Kef from Imperial Radch. It suppresses emotions, so people either take it in the mistaken belief they will become transcendent beings of pure rationality and logic or they use it to dull emotional trauma. If used for the latter, it can be incredibly habit-forming and addictive.
• The In Death series has a lot, with names like Zoner (a marijuana Fictional Counterpart), and Zeus (a PCP analogue). On the other hand, there's Whore&Rabbit, which are aphrodisiacs that only work on women and are treated like an even more evil version of Rohypnol, but the effects are vastly different. And then there's Funk; it seems to live somewhere in the downer category of drugs but has really insane side effects including basically turning someone into an albino complete with vision issues. Some of the drugs are analogous and some aren't really classifiable in the usual categories.
• In Fury Born: Members of the Cadre use a top-secret cocktail of drugs nicknamed "the Tick" that vastly accelerates their mental processes so that everything (including their own physical actions) appears to be happening in Bullet Time, giving them subjective time to consider what's happening and plan their responses. It's physically harmless and non-addictive, with the only downside that everyone using it experiences gut-wrenching nausea when they come down off it. Some of the troops suspect that is intentional in order to discourage them from using it except when necessary.
• Incarceron has ket, which is another leaf that stains the chewer's mouth red. It's probably based on betel nut.
• Mentioned in passing in the Claire Carmichael book Incognito: kava is a drink which appears to be as popular as coffee or tea. Kava is a real drug, though not particularly well-known outside the islands of the Pacific.
• Inheritance Trilogy: The blood of Physical Gods is a powerful narcotic that grants a period of heightened awareness and magical power, which some godlings with a more utilitarian attitude towards their own divinity are happy to sell at top dollar.
• The Jackelian Series has mumbleweed (a fantasy cannabis), lifelast (a life-extension drug), and shine (an anabolic steroid used by warriors). Steamman reprobates drug themselves into happy delirium by adding magnesium to the coke that fuels their boiler-hearts.
• In John Dies at the End, the plot revolves around a mysterious drug called "Soy Sauce", which gives the user enhanced sensory perception, clairvoyance, and the ability to see monsters and dimensional portals. The twist is that the Sauce is apparently sentient: it seems to choose whether its users get to receive those abilities or just get completely destroyed or driven insane. It even has sufficient control over reality/probablity itself that it can, by contriving some series of absurd coincidences, have itself returned to users who try to throw it away.
• Journey to Chaos: Mana can cause quite a high in sufficient concentrations. The vapor form known as "Fog" is the most common form. In the words of Basilard, "It goes straight to the soul. Even for mages like us it can be a heady experience. For Ceihans, I imagine it would be closer to 'divine bliss.'" One of the villains in Looming Shadow operates a den of this stuff and charges kon instead of gold from his customers. They pay it, repeatedly, until they die, go insane, or mutate into a monster.
• The Kept Man of the Princess Knight: Release has an effect much like opiates—euphoria followed by an unpleasant crash, and highly addictive—and regular users tend to develop dark spots on their necks. For followers of the Sun God who divinely inspired its invention, however, it's a Super Serum.
• The Kingdom's Disdain: The Mother Leeches' paralyzing venom is sometimes extracted to create a recreational drug called "silch-grog".
  Cardinal: "That made sense. They may have almost killed me and filled my body with eggs, but they made me feel damn good about it."
• King Solomon's Mines: The Taduki herb is a hallucinogen appearing in the later Allan Quartermain novels, which the title character uses to go on vision quests.
• Labyrinths of Echo has a few and established early on that people born in one world reacts abnormally on psychoactive substances of another. So, while locals, along with children, guzzle their Soup of Rest for a little relaxation and daydreaming, while Sir Max was instantly on high to the giggling idiocy followed by a withdrawal "as if trying to Going Cold Turkey after several years of heroin addiction" despite the help of highly skilled healers. On the other hand, Kakhar's Balsam is a psychostimulant strong enough that locals don't let each other drive under it, even though their traffic is excruciatingly slow by our standards, while Max drinks it much like strong coffee, and suffers even less side-effects. Conversely, once he accidentally acquired pot from our world and gave it to his Nigh-Invulnerable friend with steel self-control to "relax a little" — he was berated for not having a clue after personal experience with such things.
• The Last Binding: Polly serves her guests an enchanted primrose wine that provides a few hours of good cheer and a gentle come-down with no side effects.
• The Last Dragonslayer series has several:
  • Overlaps with G-Rated Drug in the case of Marzipan. "Marzipan addiction" is treated similarly to alcoholism or addiction to narcotics — but Marzipan is also described as a natural resource dug out of the ground and used to power much of the UnUnited Kingdom after it's been refined into Almondoleum.
  • When Jennifer encounters a group of "Jeopardy Tourists" on holiday in the perilous Cambrian Empire during The Eye of Zoltar, one of them tries to bum some magic off of her to get high on — she instantly rebuffs him because "the use of magic for recreational purposes was stupid, dangerous, and irresponsible." One of the tourists does manage to steal a handful of prepackaged enchantments and the resulting overdose nearly kills him.
    "So listen, I know you run Kazam, so got any S? Y'know, something to while away the dull evenings between bouts of excitement and terror?"
    "S?"
    "Spells," he said in a low voice. "The weirder the better, but none of that 'changing into animals' stuff because it can totally mess with your head."
• The Lensman series had nitrolabe, thionite, bentlam, and hadive. However, opium and heroin were still in circulation. Most of the stuff listed is comparable to drugs on the streets today (bentlam is described in decent detail in Gray Lensman and comes off as pretty tame: basically, snuff that conks you out). Then there's thionite: the big one, so dangerous that trafficking in it is a capital offense. With thionite, the user experiences the illusion of the gratification of their every desire, however noble or base. The catch is that while the psychotropic effects are tolerance-inducing (and so incredibly addictive that the one-time user can be traumatised for months), the physiological effects are not — and eventually the increasing dose required by the addict to have the same psychological effect is lethal. Always. And the effective dose is tiny: in First Lensman, a single dose was described as several tiny granules in a nasal capsule.
• In Masques, Aralorn at one point ingests an herb that numbs pain but has the side-effect of making her unable to eat anything, and she has problems walking in a straight line, too. Considering that her fingernails have been removed by a Torture Technician, it's understandable that she's not worried about side-effects at the time.
• The Mass Effect Expanded Universe introduced red sand, implied to be cocaine that's been exposed to element zero radiation. Gets the user high, and also lets them temporarily use a weakened form of biotic powers. It started popping up in the main game series soon afterward.
• The Government Drug Enforcement regimen in Matched includes the Green Tablet, whose calming sensation works something like Soma-Lite.
• In the Matthew Swift book The Minority Council, Pixie Dust is a super-addictive drug that enhances the magical talent of the user tenfold. It's also made out of the ashes of previous users, as prolonged use turns you into dust.
• Medusa's Web features a subculture trading in "spiders", Geometric Magic sigils with a variety of arcane effects, some of which people can get addicted to. There are several direct parallels drawn between one character's spider addiction and another's alcohol problem, and it's a plot point that doing spiders was big in 1920s Hollywood, a time and place where a lot of people were doing a variety of things stronger than alcohol.
• The novelization of Metropolis (and cut portions of the film) has Maohee, a hallucinogen that causes a large group to experience the visions of a single person (problems arise when a worker takes it). Drinking water erases any memory of the drug whatsoever.
• In Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, there is "Ambrosia", an oily, black fluid that when poured into a peculiar's eyes, lets out a scorching beam of light, and after fading, temporarily increases the strength of their powers. After wearing off, it leaves the user drained and temporarily blinded, with their powers permanently weakening after enough doses. Chronic users wear masks, as the hot rays from their eyes melt their skin over time, leaving their faces disfigured. Additionally the drug is made from the second soul of peculiars
• Fictional drugs abound in Naked Lunch: Black Meat, Mugwump Juice, et cetera.
• The Name of the Wind has Denner Resin, which acts like opium. Addicts can be spotted because of their very white smiles (and the fact that they will do anything to get their next fix). This becomes a significant plot point when a local dragon finds a Denner Tree orchard, eats the trees, and becomes addicted... and then it runs out of trees.
• In Nightshifted, there is a drug called "Luna Lobos", which is water extracted from the footprint of a werewolf, which is known to turn people into werewolves according to myth. It does so in the novel, too, which is why people feel so good after ingesting it; werewolves do have superior healing abilities.
• The Nightside series is prone to blend this trope with a Shout-Out, featuring references to people who smoke Martian red weed or mainline some Hyde for kicks.
• Otherland has "charge", which is taken through electronic implants.
• In Paradox, one of the few drugs that the Alliance bans is "wet", so called because it liquifies the brain after two doses. One of the cheaper ways of producing it is apparently to crack open sentient crystals.
• The plot-relevant drug in Perdido Street Station is Dreamshit, which is made up of dreams made physical and sawdust. A dose knocks the user unconscious while they experience all the dreams (of all "genres") semi-simultaneously. It's very intense but the hangover doesn't last long. The "dreams made physical" part are the secretions of a slake-moth, an incredibly dangerous monster that eats minds — Dreamshit is almost literally dream shit, the digested consciousnesses of its victims.
• The Perfect Run: Bliss, a highly addictive drug created by Bacchus' branch of the Augusti and shipped all over Europe. Shroud claims that this drug kills about twenty-thousand people annually, Ki-jung is a former addict. Its true purpose is to make normal humans sterile.
• Blisterweed in Pit Dragon Chronicles is normally dragon food. Humans occasionally smoke it, which causes aggression and (with prolonged use) distinctive stains.
• In the world of The Power, where women have developed the ability to shoot electricity from their fingertips, a snort of Glitter heavily boosts their powers and lets them shock people from much longer distances than normal. Tatiana Moskolev, the leader of the Lady Land of Bessapara, distributes the drug to her female soldiers, while Roxy Monke uses her distribution of Glitter to become one of the most powerful crime bosses in Europe.
• Being a collection of shorts, Pump Six and Other Stories has an entire slew of those:
  • Tingle, a "soft" stimulant from The Fluted Girl. Aside making you giddy, it also gives munchies for sweets. And it's apparently legal.
  • Whatever Effy is, Alvarez in Pump Six trips out on it so hard, his Inner Monologue turns into barely coherent rambling, as he tries to make sense out of his hallucinations and task at hand. There are other people going in the drug-induced bliss non-stop, but since the whole society is on a verge of a complete collapse, nobody cares — and those who do care drug themselves out specifically to forget. One of the signs of taking it are bulging, hazy eyes.
  • Mez from Pasho is some sort of alcohol distilled by Jai tribals from a poisonous desert shrub. They never purify it fully, as the small dose of the toxin cause euphoria and may give hallucinations. But be it poorly distilled, in large amount or with regular intake and it's lethal. This is a plot point, too.
• Onadyn in Red Handed was made for aliens who couldn't handle oxygen, but humans started using it to get high.
• Red Dwarf:
  • "Bliss", a brown powder that literally makes the user believe that they're God. The high from taking Bliss lasts only 15 minutes and is followed by 25 years of suicidal depression, causing most users to become addicted immediately. It can also supposedly get someone hooked just by looking at it.
  • The Total Immersion Videogame Better than Life, which gives the player their heart's deepest desires. Unlike the more innocuous version from the TV series, the book version acts as a Lotus-Eater Machine: it hides its existence from the player's memory, and comes up with plausible reasons for why all their fantasies are coming true. Without someone in the real world to care for them, a "Game head" will typically waste away and die fairly quickly.
• Red Moon Rising (Moore): Real blood is highly addictive to vamps. Some vamps also use prescription blood thinners and coagulates to obtain a species-specific high.
• A Scanner Darkly has Substance-D, sometimes abbreviated as "D" or "Slow Death". It's a powerful hallucinogen with some schizophrenic side-effects.
• The Shadowhunter Chronicles: Yin Fen is a highly-addictive stimulant and poison. It provides a feeling of exhilaration and ecstasy, but slowly kills its user and leaches the color from their body. A major character in The Infernal Devices, Jem Carstairs, is unwillingly made reliant on the drug, which causes him to grow weak and sickly.
• The Ship Who...:
  • Dramatic Mission describes "mindtrap", a mind-expanding drug considered harmless and mainly useful for helping to retain memory. An older actor who can't afford memory loss has been taking such a high dose for so long that it's softened his bones and left him with chronic fatigue and pain.
  • PartnerShip has several designer drugs, including Blissto and Seductron. The latter, rather than being an aphrodesiac, makes people very stupid and suggestible to the point where a Corrupt Corporate Executive doses an employee who wants a cut of his profits with it and tells him to walk, unsuited, into a room full of Ganglicide vapor. Alpha, a Clandestine Chemist working at a drug rehab clinic, likes to dose charity patients addicted to Blissto with a variant of that drug that seemingly cures them, only to inform them that they'll die if not regularly dosed, all the better to have minions who value her life highly.
• Six of Crows features jurda, a stimulant made from orange blossoms. The invention of a variation of it, jurda parem, which increases magical ability but takes a usually fatal toll on the user, kicks off the plot.
• Snow Crash's titular drug is the center of its plot and is unusual in that it's distributed both in real life and in The Metaverse. Its real-life version is distributed in special timed delivery canisters with self-destruct mechanisms to avoid anyone getting their hands on a sample of it. This is to hide that it's in fact a Mind Virus laced with drugs like cocaine.
• Solar Queen: Sargasso of Space describes a drug called crax seed, apparently chewed like tobacco (there's a reference to someone having spit out a crax cud). While high on the stuff, the user is faster, stronger, and smarter than normal. When they come down, they come down hard: "What occurred to them later was not pretty at all."
• A Song of Ice and Fire also features a handful of drugs
  • Milk of the poppy — basically opium, which is usually used to deal with pain, but can also get addictive. Gregor Clegane takes it to deal with his chronic headaches, and seems to guzzle it like water.
    • In "A Feast for Crows", this comes back to bite Clegane hard. His excessive use of the stuff has given him such a high tolerance for it that it's practically useless against the pain of a poisoned spear wound to his abdomen.
  • Sourleaf — a mild drug apparently similar to tobacco that, when chewed, stains the user's teeth bloody red.
  • Shade of the evening — a psychotropic drug used by warlocks. It turns the user's lips blue.
• In The Song of the Shattered Sands, the novella Of Sand and Malice Made recounts an incident in the early days of Ceda's courier job. She ends up embroiled with two demigods and an inhuman monster that provided the wealthiest individuals in the city with Irindai (also known as the Cressetwing moth). The Irindai is a magical moth that's put in the mouth of its user. A victim is chosen and there's a ritual to activate the moth's ability, the victim has their memories pulled out and imbibed by the user. Both victim and user find the moth to be addictive.
• The first book in Diane Duane's Space Cops series, "Mindblast", is centered around the spread of Hyper 2, an intelligence enhancing (and lethal) drug complete with full chemical name and a lengthy description of how the drug worked. Cue heartbreak when the heroes discover that the man who created the drug wasn't some sleazy dealer, he had been trying to research a cure for his mentally handicapped daughter.
• The third book of the Spaceforce (2012) series, Oblivion, centers around a drug of the same name. Oblivion induces a lucid dreaming state in users, allowing them to experience a fantasy scenario of their choice — innocent or less so. Unfortunately, it can also cause users to return to the dream state without warning and at random days or weeks later, often causing fatal accidents.
• The Sprawl Trilogy has several. There are a wide variety of "derms" that can be stuck to the skin (though derms are also used for non-recreational pharmaceuticals) and several kinds of crystals that are ingested or inhaled.
  • And in Neuromancer, Case goes through several trying to find something that his augmented liver can't process (it's augmented to prevent him getting high on stimulants). And he actually found one: a drug so wild that it makes Case hypersensitive bordering on synesthesia. And the comedown's a bitch.
• In Star Carrier, acetic acid (like in vinegar) has similar effects on the Agletsch as alcohol does on humans (the most common way of producing vinegar is to turn loose acetobacter on some diluted alcohol, so it's possible to see a correlation).
• Getting more specific in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, mind-altering drugs are typically called spice and many of them are actually mined. Confusingly, perfectly normal food additives are also called spice, and a lot of spices also have medical uses.
  • Easy justification for the confusion: "spice" is a street name.
  • Pure glitterstim is made by giant underground spiders, is activated by light, and grants temporary ability to read nonhostile minds, although it also brings paranoia and apparently can make people stupider — in the X-Wing Series, a habitual glitbiter forgets that he's talking to Wedge Antilles via hologram and thinks he's under attack.
  • Bota is a Magic Antidote to, well, everything, and when a Jedi accidentally injects herself with a recently prepared sample she momentarily becomes one with the Force. She tries it again later and it works a second time, and it then preoccupies her thoughts and causes her to doubt and struggle with herself until she overcomes it, gives the samples to a droid, and sends it off to give to the Jedi Masters, who presumably will know what to do with it. Years later Vader, having read the report, takes it along with something that would make the effects more permanent. It doesn't work too well. Apparently bota goes bad.
  • The Essential Guide to Alien Species mentions that Arcona can become addicted to salt. Yes, sodium chloride. It's a hallucinogen.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • The Alethi elite are afflicted with something called "the Thrill", a race-wide bloodlust that drives them to fight, contest, and conquer. Their Blood Knight nature (as well as the fact that every aspect of their culture revolves around war and combat in some way) makes a lot more sense when you keep in mind that many of them are literally addicted to killing and have built their society and religion to justify it. For example, the Vorin religion teaches that the afterlife is one massive war to reclaim the Tranquiline Halls, so soldiers are the most important occupation, and getting your own soldiers killed in pointless battles isn't seen as a big deal since it's important training for the afterlife. It is actually the ability of Nergaoul (one of the Unmade) in action, created by Odium to craft the ultimate champion to serve him. Ironically, said intended champion, Dalinar Kholin, became an unstoppable conqueror, Determinator and Big Good that was able to resist Odium's attempt to corrupt him partly because of the Thrill, and ultimately let Dalinar imprison Nergaoul and shut off the source of the Thrill permanently.
  • Somewhat less remarkable is Firemoss, an addictive drug used by rubbing it between the thumb and forefinger. When rubbed, it gives off a crackling sound and wisps of smoke and can blister the fingers until calluses are built up. The exact effects are somewhat unclear, but it seems to relieve pain and induce a general euphoria. It's occasionally used as an anesthetic, but it's addictive properties make it unpopular for that purpose.
• The short story "Subterraneans" by William Shunn and Laura Chavoen^note published in the anthology Glitter and Mayhem revolves around pills called "subs" (though in-story it's short for "substitute", not "subterranean") that allow the user to pull a temporary Grand Theft Me. If two people take them at the same time and make eye contact, they can do a "Freaky Friday" Flip.
• The Tarot series by Piers Anthony eventually reveals the protagonist was a former card sharp who was addicted to Mnem, a temporary memory enhancer with a nasty side effect: Withdrawal damaged the mind, eventually wiping most of the victim's memories. His mind was almost completely wiped when he found himself in the care of a priesthood and eventually joined them.
• The Thraxas books feature two of note — thazis, which seems to be roughly equivalent to cannabis, and dwa, which seems to be the equivalent of heroin.
• In the Tortall Universe, there's "laugh powder", "hotblood wine" (wine spiked with amphetamines) and "rainbow dream". Some or all of these are probably real drugs under fantasy names (poppy is also mentioned), but we'll never know.
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch has Can-D, a hallucinogen which induces a communal virtual reality in those who use it, though many Martian colonists believe that Can-D physically changes reality around the users. Things get much more ambiguous when the title character comes back from the Prox system with Chew-Z, an exceptionally trippy alien drug that allegedly makes Can-D seem like a cheap imitation and has the side effect of causing the users to think more like he does than they used to and also spontaneously develop Palmer's "three stigmata" — artificial eyes, a metal jaw, and a replacement arm.
• Twig features a lot of these prominently. Most of them go unnamed, but the one that receives the most focus is "Wyvern", a drug that, if taken, increases the brain's elasticity and pliability, making it possible for the person to "reorganize" their mind to increase their intelligence in specific areas. Someone taking the drug is described as learning new things incredibly quickly... but also forgetting things just as quickly, meaning they have to have great focus to retain memories they do want to keep. Some Academy students use it as a study aid. The main character, Sylvester, is almost permanently on an extreme dosage of Wyvern (more than twice what a normal adult can tolerate; Sylvester himself has been augmented to handle it), heightening his intelligence and adaptability massively, but he also has issues with short term memory loss.
• The Ultimate Killing Game features an unnamed drug that causes apathy.
• Several of these substances, such as obscura and lho, are also mentioned elsewhere in the Warhammer 40,000 canon, such as the Gaunt's Ghosts series. Though they are Fantastic Drugs, their uses approximate that of opium and something between cannibis and tobacco, respectively.
  • Ravenor, of which a large part of the plot involves a drugs ring investigation, mentions several fictional drugs such as lho (which is the 40K equivalent to tobacco), obscura, lodestones and flects.
  • Of these, flects are the most plot-relevant and the strangest: hallucinogenic shards of glass used by looking into them, which induces intense visions. Mention is made of "viewing parties" where groups of people share a large, intact pane.
  • While Ravenor depicts lho akin to tobacco, descriptions of the effects of lho by other authors make it more similar to cannabis.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Male and female magic users (called channelers) find the very act of casting magic from the Source addictive. So much so that many channelers only use magic when necessary, since it is easy to "burn out", permanently severing your ability to do magic, if you try to pull in too much magic.
  • Forkroot is a minty plant that has almost no effect on Muggles but acts as a powerful sedative on people who have the ability to channel the One Power, causing unconsciousness, prolonged weakness and dizziness, and temporarily weakened or negated powers. This causes major problems when it falls into the hands of an invading army with a Ban on Magic.
• White Noise features the Dylar, a drug that is capable of making its user surpass the fear of death, with the side effect of losing the distinction between uttered words and real events.
• Fisstech in The Witcher series is, for all practical intents, cocaine.

Live-Action TV

• 2point4 Children: "The Sweet Hereafter" features the Porter family coming into possession of a chocolate bar called "Drool", which has such an addictive effect on Ben, David, and Jenny that they fight each other for the product. In the end, the bars are recalled for their psychological impact on people.
• The 10th Kingdom:
  • The Trolls have "dwarf moss" that makes the user see fairies. However, the real example is the Troll King's invisibility shoes, which give their wearer such a great sense of power that they become more and more obsessed with wearing them all the time. Even touching them seems to be enough to begin the process; as soon as Virginia does so, she hides them in her backpack, thinks of nothing else, and acts increasingly paranoid, even clutching the shoes like Linus's security blanket. This is lampshaded by Wolf (twice!) when he claims "magic is very nice, but it's very easy to get addicted", and later tells Virginia she is "hopelessly addicted to those shoes... and I'm not too far behind!" Whether this is meant to be a parody or an object lesson is never made clear, but it certainly plays out with extreme hilarity. Of course, there are literary antecedents for some sort of invisibility equipment acting as a drug.
  • A later example would be the scene in the Deadly Swamp, where Tony and Virginia eat the magic mushrooms, drink the swamp water, and sleep (after being explicitly told not to) and hallucinate a bizarre dream. The fact that Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale" plays throughout is, of course only, window dressing for setting the scene... To hammer the point home, the soundtrack piece which accompanies both this scene and parts of the magic shoe shenanigans is entitled "Addicted to Magic".
• The 100 has "the Red", a synthetic drug developed by the Mountain Men to turn people into Reapers. It's so addictive that anyone injected with it becomes borderline feral and will do absolutely anything to get another dose, and if they go too long without dosing up the withdrawal symptoms will kill them.
• The 4400: In "Blink", Naomi Bonderman, who disappeared in 1992, has the ability to secrete an oil through her hands which causes people to have vivid hallucinations about people from their past with whom they have unresolved issues. Her grandson Randy Atwater used traces of the oil on the herbs in her garden to create a drug called Blink. He then sent cookies laced with Blink to Tom and Diana in order to thank them for saving his grandmother's life by uncovering the promicin scandal. Tom had visions of his late father Mitch, with whom he had a very poor relationship, while Diana had visions of her ex-fiancé Josh Sandler, who cheated on her two weeks about the wedding. Although Randy's intentions were basically good, Erika Lundgren and two other Blink users could not cope with their hallucinations and were Driven to Suicide. Erika saw her uncle Patrick, who sexually abused her as a child.
• In Alice (2009), Wonderland's economy runs on the sale of liquid emotions extracted from Oysters, or people from the human world.
• Almost Human, being a futuristic crime drama, inevitably has these. One example is "deep", a drug made from a deep-sea plant that is heavily addictive and has a low lethal dose.
• In nearly every scene that he's in, Technical Boy from American Gods (2017) is seen smoking from a glass pipe full of synthetic toad skins. Shadow describes the smell as being like an appliance fire.
• American Horror Story: Double Feature has the Muse, an unknown chemical compound in the form of black pills, which upon ingestion boosts a person's creative skills to incredible levels (for instance, the main character, a screenwriter, ends up composing an entire pilot script in under four hours). The downside to the drug at first just appears to be leaving the taker manic and irritable, but it turns out that the real consequence is being left with a craving for blood, preferably human. And that's if you actually have actual artistic talents for the Muse to highlight — the talentless are mutated into Pale Ones, feral bloodthirsty creatures that look and act like silent movie vampires.
• In Andromeda, there exists a narcotic called Flash that is taken by dispensing the drug into one's eye with an eye dropper. The drug gives the user all-white eyes and an incredible high, making the user feel stronger and faster. It's also highly addictive. Beka's father was an addict and her uncle once exposed her to the drug, leading to her taking large doses of Flash later on when she needed to perform some particularly taxing piloting.
• Angel has Orpheus, a drug primarily used by supernatural beings which is so named because it sends the user into potentially hellish visionary journeys. Faith injects herself with it and allows Angelus to bite her, even though it is potentially fatal to humans, to incapacitate him so that he can be captured and re-souled. Most of the episode "Orpheus" depicts their resulting shared hallucination.
• Arrowverse:
  • Batwoman (2019): Snakebite, from Season 2, is a street drug that makes you hallucinate that your greatest regrets never happened. It's so named from the distinctive double-needled syringe used to take it: one gives you Scarecrow's fear toxin, and the other modifies it with psychedelic fungi.
  • Legends of Tomorrow: During the back half of Season 6, Constantine compensates for the loss of his inherent magic earlier in the season by drinking vampire blood to give himself a boost. This quickly becomes a metaphor for drug use, as he's manic and unpredictable when on it and sickly and irritable when in withdrawal, and the plot line culminates with Zari threatening to leave him if he doesn't sober up, which he attempts by going cold turkey. Unfortunately, the nature of the addiction causes him to develop an Enemy Within manifesting his darker impulses, which eventually takes over during the final episodes of the season.
  • Superman & Lois: Season 2 sees people in Smallville start to sell ground up X-Kryptonite crystals as a steroid. Ingested by means of an inhaler, it grants greatly enhanced speed and strength, and occasionally also gives people outright super-strength and other Kryptonian abilities.
• Babylon 5:
  • "Stims" were used before Galactica, with similar realistic effect. The abusing character, Dr. Franklin (yes, a medical doctor), starts out simply using them as necessary to keep up with his work, then grows addicted, almost kills a patient, gets investigated by Security Chief Garibaldi (a recovering alcoholic who knows whereof he speaks), leaves his job, suffers withdrawal, and eventually almost dies in an attempt to "find himself."
  • There's also "Dust", a substance that temporarily grants telepathy to "mundanes" (non-Telepaths); this is used to take somebody else's thoughts for a spin. In "Dust to Dust", G'Kar gets his hands on some and tries using it on Londo; he realizes halfway through that this is wrong, and gains enlightenment (probably by the telepathic intervention of Kosh) in the process. He ends up writing a book, founding a religion, and becoming friends (if vitriolic ones) with Londo.
  • The G'Quan Eth plant from "By Any Means Necessary" is another. Narn followers of G'Quan burn it in certain sacred rituals. The Centauri mix it with alcohol to get high.
• Shows up in Battlestar Galactica (2003), where Laura Roslin's use of the drug "chamalla" has elements of morphine, heroin and marijuana, including painful withdrawal, hallucinations, and its use as a painkiller rather than actually affecting the disease she's taking it for. Similarly, several of the pilots find themselves obligated to use "stims" (the all-purpose sci-fi version of amphetamine) to keep up with their round-the-clock responsibilities, and suffer severe physical and emotional damage as a result. There was also a plant on New Caprica that was made into cigarettes that was smoked by Adama and Roslin, among others. From the way the effects were described, and that they already had an equivalent plant to Earth tobacco, it was assumed by many to be some form of cannabis (they also referred to it as New Caprica weed!).
• Temproxate in Beforeigners was developed to reduce sensory overload in recent arrivals from the past. A number of said arrivals have sold their stock of the drug to people from the present day, who abuse it recreationally. One of the protagonists, Lars Haaland, is a temp addict before detoxing in the finale.
• Vampires' blood-drinking in Being Human (UK) is an addiction, not a biological necessity, and comes complete with painful withdrawal symptoms and a 12-step program (well, for a while anyway.) The American remake treats blood the same for vampires, but adds possession for ghosts, who treat having a new physical body as a high due to the renewed ability to use their senses again. The negative side effects include getting stuck in the person's body and later having your own memories of life and death become part of that person's memories, driving them insane. Sally really screwed things up because her memories at the time also involved the "Reaper" who she thought was going to remove her from the afterlife.
• Blake's 7: Shadow from the episode of that name. There's also "adrenaline and soma" in episodes written by Allan Prior, a Shout-Out to Brave New World. The adrenaline is drunk as a stimulant (whether it's actual adrenaline or just a brand name is unknown) with the soma presumably a downer to take the edge off.
• The Boys (2019): V is a type of substance that some superheroes use to enhance their powers. It's treated like other performance-enhancing drugs. It turns out to be what gave them powers in the first place — superheroes were given the drug as infants.
• Brass Eye notoriously aired an episode on drugs which highlighted the danger of a new designer drug called "cake". This came in the form of a giant yellow pill, and potential effects included slowing down time so a second lasts an hour, a bloating condition known as "Czech neck" and, in one case, a girl who "cried all the water out of her body." What made this example particularly controversial was that several real-life celebrities were asked to give their opinions and one MP even asked a question about it in Parliament. Suffice it to say that he didn't see the funny side, and subsequent repeats of the episode include an apology.
• Brave New World: Soma is a small fish-egg like pill taken by everyone in New London which causes feelings of euphoria and happiness. Bernard hands them out like candy in his job as a Counselor. It turns out to come in various types that are designated by color.
• The fictional blue meth from Breaking Bad. It is actually possible to make blue meth using the method Walter used in the show, but in reality, that kind of methamphetamine is rather impure. Pure meth, as the "blue sky" of the show is claimed to be, is usually transparent like glass in real life.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine has Giggle Pig, which is specifically a derived form of ecstasy.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Season 5 has vampires feeding on drug-using humans, including Buffy's boyfriend Riley. It may or may not be the Orpheus from Angel.
  • Season 6 focuses quite a bit on Willow's addiction to casting magic spells.
• In Continuum, Retrevinol (or "Flash" in street slang) is a drug from the future originally used as an Alzheimer's treatment. It allows the user to vividly recall memories, but results in a dangerous sleepwalking effect as they get lost in their memory, not to mention addiction as they continue to pine for their brighter past.
• Defiance has "Blue Devil", a powerful stimulant developed by the Earth Republic during the war. One of the main ingredients is human epinephrine, when the synthetic kind became scarce some cooks started obtaining it from natural sources.
• In Diablero, Lupe extracts demons' tears and sells them as a drug. Unfortunately, if you take enough of it your bones become very tasty to a terrifying type of demon called an ahuizotl.
• Dinosaurs:
  • In the parodic drug special "A New Leaf", Robbie, Earl, and Charlene become addicted to a plant that is never really named.
  • Robbie also develops an addiction to "thornoids" when trying to develop his muscle mass, a small, annoying, and insulting rodent covered in spikes that acts just like steroids when eaten.
• Doctor Who has a couple of examples:
  • The Very Special Episode "Nightmare of Eden" has the Fourth Doctor and Romana II hunting smugglers and dealers of "vraxoin", an incredibly powerful narcotic which appears to cause instant addiction with only a single dose.
  • "Gridlock" deals with a future human culture with smart drugs that can produce single specific emotions. The invention of a "Bliss" drug led to the collapse of civilization, resulting in humanity being forced to live in horrible traffic for generations.
• Earth: Final Conflict:
  • The episode "Bliss" introduces the titular drug, which is highly addictive. Though Bliss is delivered into the body through Taelon-engineered orbs, the drug itself is derived from a plant native to Earth and not created by Taelon technology.
  • Kryss is created by feeding humans alien plant-life, then extracting a chemical from the humans' bodies. Kryss was created to sustain the Taelons' bodies on Earth, but it is possible for a Taelon to take too much kryss and become addicted to the substance.
  • In one episode, the Taleons develop a way to extract emotions from humans and turn it into a physical substance, which they can then absorb into their bodies so they can then feel those same emotions.
• Farscape:
  • "Distillate of Laka" helps take the edge off of John's Aeryn issues... when he doubles the dose.
  • There's also freslin, a form of Space Ecstasy, which turns out to be made by "milking" the glands of sentient beings.
• Grimm has Jay, a Wesen-only drug described as a combination of Meth, Rat Poison, and Helium, though functionally it's basically Heroin. Nick has to hunt down and break up a drug ring dealing the stuff, made more difficult from the fact that, since it's lethal to normal humans, it's not on any official government lists.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): Vampire blood has drug-like qualities. In "...After the Phantoms of Your Former Self", Louis de Pointe du Lac vividly elucidates to Daniel Molloy (a former substance abuser) the sensations he felt on his first night as a vampire with his maker's blood coursing through his veins.
  Louis: Lestat's blood was giggling inside me, teasing my senses, illuminating the district with overwhelming detail, as if I had walked my entire life as a dead man, and now dead, could finally receive the secrets of existence.
  Daniel: You were fucking loaded.
  Louis: Beyond articulation.
• In the Flesh has a new drug just for zombies (or act and behave like people but without the need to drink or eat) and seems rather popular seeing as no other vices are available to them. The only person we see use one however ends up dead... well, more dead at any rate.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider W has the Gaia Memories, specialized items forged from the world's internal data which people use to become Dopant and are distributed by criminals around the city of Futo. While not directly compared to drugs, the series makes many very unsubtle allusions to them being such, with the Dopants Meaningful Name being in part the word "doping", one villain expressing outrage when he hears they are being distributed to children, them being directly injected into the body via a marked spot on their body given by a dealer, possessing addictive qualities, and gradually rendering the users personalities violently unstable over time, eventually either killing or severely injuring them after their bodies are unable to sustain their developing powers. Notably, while both the heroes and villains also use them to battle, as is tradition in Rider, this involves the use of equipment specifically designed to harness the power safely.
  • Kamen Rider Fourze: The Astro Switches used by Zodiarts. Like Gaia Memories, the Switches are distributed to high schoolers by the villains, and their use is shown to result in addiction and insanity. In one episode, a previous Astro Switch user is shown having withdrawal symptoms, refusing to go to school out of fear of receiving another Switch and having a relapse.
• In one episode of Kingdom Adventure, meant to teach against the dangers of drugs, a few of the characters try something called a "wonder root". Its effects apparently entail some kind of high, hearing things, and eventually blindness.
• Season 4 of The Last Ship has Nostos, a narcotic tea made from boiling plants infected with the Red Rust virus. It creates powerful hallucinations, in which the drinker relives their happiest memories. As such, it's highly addictive. The season's Big Bad, Dr. Paul Vellek, intends on using Nostos-laced crops to brainwash away humanity's violent tendencies.
• The meat served by the most exquisite of The League of Gentlemen, Hilary Briss, definitely serves as an analogue to a drug, including the obsessive behavior and the nosebleeds but despite all suggestions that bring to mind a certain source, the writers have denied it, claiming that there is nothing more mundane than cannibalism and that the truth is so much worse... which makes one wonder — what the hell is he providing, unicorn meat?
• Lexx calls its Fantastic Marijuana "gongslanger root".
• NZT in Limitless allows people to retain and access every memory they have, make connections between abstract pieces of information, and calculate everything around them. Nobody, not even the FBI, know where the drug comes from or who is distributing it. Even government attempts to reverse engineer it have failed and caused the users to burn out and die. Main character Brian is the only known person who can use it without the potentially fatal side effects because he's secretly being provided an antidote developed by another NZT user.
• Maniac (2018): the pharmaseutical company NBP has developed a novel new cure for mental illness that comes in the form of three pills shaped like an A, B and C. We see that there are some people, namely second lead character Annie, and company scientist Dr. Muramoto, who use the A pill recreationally, by snrting and smoking respectively.
• Once Upon a Time has Maleficent diluting Sleeping Curse poison with seawater and mushroom to create a sedative that "takes the edge off". Essentially, it's the fantasy medieval counterpart of heroin.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "Essence of Life", Dr. Nathan Seward invented a drug called essence of life (or "S") which allows people to see their deceased loved ones again in the form of a hallucination. This is accomplished by taking a personal item belonging to the deceased and gleaning DNA from it. The DNA is distilled, refined, cloned millions of times and converted into a liquid. The scent given off by the liquid triggers the user's sense memories and causes them to imagine their loved one. The experience is driven by the user's subconscious, meaning that it can bring unresolved emotions to the surface. S is highly addictive and can lead to insanity if the user overdoses. Dr. Seward recommends inhaling only one drop per session and no more than two sessions per day.
• Pandora: Rydine is a performance-enhancing drug the military secretly used on soldiers in the Zatarian war that makes them very hot-headed and is very addictive.
• In addition to the drugs mentioned under Literature, Red Dwarf the series also has several examples:
  • Marijuana gin, which is probably simply cannabis-infused gin. Lister has drunk it at least once before, according to Rimmer.
  • Titan mushrooms, "more popularly known to the space-beatnik community as 'freaky fungus'": hallucinogenic mushrooms grown on Saturn's largest moon, where Red Dwarf had stopped off for shore leave. Lister fed Rimmer some Titan mushrooms as part of a fried breakfast, causing Rimmer to show up to inspection parade almost naked and "attack two senior officers, believing them to be giraffes who were armed and dangerous".
  • Outrazone (pronounced vaguely like "ultrazone" in a mock-Canadian accent) is a chemical gunk that is a highly-addictive drug for mechanoids. Kryten's outrazone-addicted "brother" Able is The Stoner.
• Riverdale:
  • "Jingle-Jangle" seems to basically be ecstasy in effect, but it looks and is eaten like Pixy Stix.
  • Season 3 introduces Fizzy Rocks, which seems to have a similar effect, but come in the form of Pop Rocks.
• The Secret Circle:
  • The concoction Nick and Faye take in the second episode. Magic itself could also count.
  • "Medallion" introduces us to a magical "enhancer" called Devil's Spirit.
• In Shadowhunters, the drug yin fen is made from vampire venom and both relieves pain and causes intense euphoria. This is similar to the Kiss of the Vampire effects of an actual vampire's bite, but is less intense yet longer-lasting.
• In Siempre bruja, Carmen makes an elixir to help a friend function. Two of her friends sell it as a stimulant drug.
• Siren (2018): Mermaids' songs affect humans this way. They cause an addictive desire to hear them again, with Ben even going to a support group for drug addiction over this. He's shown to listen while her recorded song plays repeatedly, exactly like an addict using.
• In Smallville, red kryptonite is Clark's personal drug, having almost destroyed his life several times over.
• Space: Above and Beyond has pylaphatamine, street name "Green Meanies". To normal humans the little green pills are just painkillers, but they're instantly addictive to InVitros, tank-grown humans such as Col. McQueen and Cooper Hawkes. Used for a Drugs Are Bad subplot in the late-series episode "R&R".
• Stargate-verse:
  • Dealing in kassa, an addictive corn-like grain, is a major source of income for the Lucian Alliance. Some of the SGC's military actions in the last couple seasons of Stargate SG-1 involved kassa interdiction.
  • There's also the Blood of Sokar, a Goa'uld-developed hallucinogen used by Apophis to interrogate SG-1 in "The Devil You Know".
  • There's also the euphoric effects of going into a sarcophagus, which gives Daniel Jackson delusions of grandeur and causes severe withdrawal symptoms when he's made to stop.
  • The Wraith from Stargate Atlantis feed on the life force of humans. To keep the victim from dying immediately, the Wraith inject an enzyme into their prey. This enzyme can be harvested from dead Warith and used as a narcotic, giving the user incredible strength and stamina, but also making them very paranoid.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • "Symbiosis" has an entire planet addicted to a drug called "felicium". It used to be legitimate medicine to treat a deadly plague; the plague is long since gone, but the addiction remains.
    • "The Game" features a really lame video game with the power to seduce the entire crew's brains, to the point of unthinking loyalty to the game's creators, leaving the Creator's Pet and his new friend to save the day.
    • TNG also came up with synthehol, a justified version of this trope. It's a replacement for alcohol in beverages that can (apparently) be flushed from the system quite rapidly if you're called back to duty while in Ten Forward. The science book Life Signs: The Biology of Star Trek went so far as to figure a way how it could work: broken down by adrenaline when Red Alert sounds. The Expanded Universe explains that synthehol was originally invented by the Ferengi for use in scams: a Ferengi con artist would invite the mark to drink, giving the mark their strongest booze while the Ferengi only drinks synthehol and fakes being drunk out of his gourd. But they quickly realized that there was a huge market for an alcohol substitute that lets people get as drunk as they like, but also lets them sober up as soon as they need to and skip the hangover. So just selling synthehol to everybody was an easier way to make money.
  • In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Jem'Hadar are addicted to the milky substance ketracel-white so much that they die without it — and it's their only means of nourishment past puberty. This is also an engineered dependency; ketracel-white, in addition to providing complete sustenance, also provides essential chemicals that their bodies need for normal function. The Jem'Hadar were essentially genetically crafted by the Founders to be their vision of perfect soldiers; the dependency ensures absolute loyalty.
    • Not just the loyalty of the Jem'Hadar, but the Vorta who are the Jem'Hadar's commanding officer. If a Jem'Hadar doesn't get his Ketrecel-White, he will descend into a mindless berserk rage in his final moments of life, killing anything in sight. The Jem'Hadar, who have expressed disdain for the Vorta, though muted by the Founders establishing Vorta as higher in rank, would overpower a Vorta in a heartbeat when they have their senses. No Ketracel just makes it more violent. The Founders figured that the reasons for the lack of Ketracel-white supplies would be one of a few issues: The Jem'Hadar are no longer loyal (in which case they'd starve them out), the Vorta commander was no longer loyal (in which case, he would face what anyone who opposes the Founders face: Death by Jem'Hadar) or the enemy tried to cut off the supply of Ketrecel-White, which would almost have to put the enemy close to Jem'Hadar in withdrawal (and the Vorta failed their mission). Of course, the one time we see something close to this occurring (The Ketracel-White wasn't completely gone, but they had to ration out to such small dosages that withdrawal symptoms had started to show), the Vorta in command realizes what is about to happen and surrenders on condition of protection from enraged Jem'Hadar.
    • Star Trek Online expands on the drug, revealing that it was actually a fungus that grew on the Hur'q homeworld. The Dominion stole all of it away in order to try and control them, but they ended up going mad. They tried to use it to create a Klingon-related soldier caste, but they broke free and equally went insane, becoming the Fek'ihri of legend. They got right with the Jem'Hadar, but when the Dominion joins the Alliance, they request all Jem'hadar to be free of this addiction.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise introduces trellium-D, a substance which is harmless to most humanoids but screws up the brains of Vulcans, making them uncontrollably emotional, paranoid, and violent. After being exposed to it once, T'Pol develops an addiction and starts injecting herself with small amounts of trellium so she can experiment with the emotions that it helps her unlock.
  • Star Trek: Discovery mainly uses the spores of the mycelial network as a hyperspace network, but exposure can lead to altered perception... and all that comes with it. After Stamets modifies his body to serve as a conduit for the network, he's set up with a cybernetic implant to control his exposure... and starts acting like he's microdosing.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • Raffi smokes snakeleaf like it's offworld marijuana.
    • A Ferengi named Sneed created a concoction that's sprayed into the eye. He calls it "splinter" because it makes the user feel like they're being repeatedly pulled apart.
• In Supernatural, Sam Winchester becomes addicted to drinking demon blood. Crowley later becomes addicted to injecting human blood after human blood was injected in him to "cure a demon".
• In the world of TekWar, Tek is a computer chip connected to the user's brain that allows them to experience amazingly realistic fantasies drawn from their subconscious. It can also burn out your synapses.
• In Torchwood: Children of Earth, the alien species named the 456 return to Earth (after abducting 12 children back in 1965) and demands 10% of the children of the world, as the children's bodies create chemicals that act as narcotics for them to "feel good" as they did with one of the children from 1965 (who is now a shrivelled husk that has never aged for 40 years but still conscious).
• Tracker (2001) had an Enixian who was making a drug that his species used as eyedrops into their highly sensitive eyes. It was destructive and often fatal to humans, which meant Cole and Mel had to put the producer out of business.
• In True Blood (and the original books The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries), vampires' blood, a.k.a. V-blood, V-juice, or V, is apparently more fun than every other recreational drug ever. It also increases the libido, the senses, and gives limited Super-Strength. It even has medicinal value for those who are wounded. Too bad vampires as a whole don't take kindly to the commoditization of their life essence. It also creates adverse withdrawal symptoms if one gets addicted. Jason's went static, and he became more aggressive and desperate. It also gave him a boner from hell when he overdosed on it, and had to have the blood painfully removed from his penis. Taking the stuff will also create a mystical bond between the user and the vampire it came from, allowing them to feel each other's emotions, making the user sexually attracted to the vampire in question, and at least to an extent allowing the vampire to keep track of the user, though the extent of how well this works is unclear.
• Van Helsing (2016): Solicyte, an artificial compound developed to repel vampires, is also highly narcotic when ingested by humans.
• The survivors of the show Whoops find a mutated berry bush that makes the user high when smashed on their forehead.

Multiple Media

• The Piraka in BIONICLE bribe Brutaka (who's a good guy suffering from a major Crisis of Faith) into working for them by supplying him with Antidermis. This works as a sort of highly powerful steroid to his species… and is also the substance that (unknown to them) makes up the Makuta. As long as he only received small doses of the stuff (which were separated from Makuta's mind), he got a power boost, but when he soaked up multiple full Makuta essences, they took control over his body, seemingly permanently — in return, they made him infinitely more powerful.

Music

• Joywave: The music video for "Half Your Age" pretends to be a commercial for a fake prescription medication called Brushitall (with the name taken from a line repeated in the song's chorus: "Brush it all, it all, brush it all, brush it away..."). However, as the video plays out, the drug turns out to be too effective, and the man in the commercial ends up developing an addiction... and then things just get weird.

Podcasts

• The Adventure Zone: Balance: Robbie/Pringles stocks the "dankest" potions, including one that resembles Orbitz and which has an effect like a cross between alcohol and salvia.
• At least two in Mission to Zyxx:
  • Dust is the most illegal and most commonly used drug in the galaxy. Thanks to a technological component even droids can do it!
  • Hyper-proton fuel is a very powerful and expensive fuel which allows ships to fly much faster than normal. Ships can handle it just fine, but it's basically meth for droids.
• Not Another D&D Podcast features R.Cane, a powdered substance that gives the user magical abilities and a wicked rush.

Radio

• Undone had a story arc about a whole range of bizarre designer drugs being smuggled between parallel worlds, all Played for Laughs.

Tabletop Games

• Base Raiders has a number of Super Soldier Drugs whose formulas were leaked after Ragnarok. Two are specifically noted to have been adapted into street drugs. "Harmony" improves emotional stability but is spiked with powerful antidepressants that cause a strong bounce-back effect when it wears off, encouraging users to buy another dose. While "Boost" permanently increases intelligence, but most dealers don't tell their buyers that it's permanent and sell them addictive placebos or blackmail them after the first dose.
• Critical Role: Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting: A sidebar called "dangerous contraband" details three magical and illegal substances that have mind-altering effects obviously modeled off of real-world drugs with enough fantastical lore to fit them into a Dungeons & Dragons game.
• Cyberpunk 2020 has a very short chapter dedicated to drugs, that, at least in the main rulebook, centers almost exclusively on the bad side effects rather than on the in-game benefits. It also includes a line about the richest people being the only ones who can afford drugs tailored to their physiologies.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Forgotten Realms has Lurien Spring Cheese, which is somewhere between Fantastic Drug and Alien Catnip. Also known as Halfling Cheese, mind cheese, and cheeeese, it's merely an unpleasant dairy product when consumed by humans, but for halflings, it's the most powerful narcotic imaginable.
  • The Known World/Mystara setting has an Alphatian drug called zzonga.
  • The 3rd Edition Book of Vile Darkness lists several fantastic drugs in the same chapter as torture devices, execution equipment, desecrated magic items, and exotic poisons (drugs really are that bad, apparently). Mechanically, drugs function like a combination of a poison and disease - those exposed to them have to make saving throws against their initial and secondary effects (it's assumed someone taking a drug voluntarily is intentionally failing their save). But the subject also has to save against becoming addicted to the drug, and if they fail that save and go too long without sating their addiciton, they'll take ability score damage until they get their fix. Drugs typically have a disadvantageous initial effect and a beneficial secondary effect (or vice versa), though some users are mainly taking them for the side effects. In all cases, taking too much of a drug too quickly can cause an overdose effect, which in some cases can be fatal. While some listed drugs are relatively mundane, others are truly fantastic:
    • Agony, or "liquid pain," is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a thick, red liquid collected by various magical methods during a torture session. The initial hit of it stuns drinkers, but gives them a Charisma bonus as well as several hours of intense pleasure, making it extremely addictive.
    • Luhix, made from the powdered stalks of a specific Abyssal plant, is sprinkled into a bleeding wound (usually self-inflicted) that is then bound shut or magically healed. The initial effect is intense pain and 1 point of damage to all ability scores, followed by an immunity to pain and a 1 or 2-point bonus to all ability scores. It's also the most viciously addictive drug in the chapter, with absolutely crippling withdrawal symptoms, and to make matters worse, luhix is also the most expensive drug on the list. One of the book's sample NPCs is a demonically-possessed blue dragon, whose controller forced them to take a hit of luhix immediately, solely to make the dragon dependent on the demon for their supply. The kicker is that luhix is also one of the most dangerous drugs in the chapter, as taking a second dose in a 24-hour period results in a high saving throw to avoid dying in horrible agony.
    • Mordayn vapor, or "dreammist," is made from a rare forest herb that is so dangerous that it can only be safely consumed by preparing it like tea and inhaling the fumes - the plant's raw powder, or water tainted by it, are deadly poisons. Those who breathe dreammist take some Constitution and Wisdom damage, and will spend up to a half-hour with even odds to lose any action attempted, because the user is entranced by visions so beautiful that normal life pales in comparison, compelling the user to take another dose once the hallucinations end. Experienced mordayn powder users thus know to toss out the "tea" as soon as they inhale its fumes, and make sure they only ever have one dose of the stuff around at a time, so they don't end up overdosing.
    • Terran brandy is fairly straightforward, a potent alcohol that deals a bit of Constitution damage but buffs the user's caster level. The catch, of course, is that the drink is "distilled from the essence of dying fey."
• Eclipse Phase features a lot of drugs. Recreational drugs, combat drugs, social drugs, narcoalgorithms for cybershelled characters… but most notably nanodrugs that use Nanomachines to induce states that simple chemicals could never accomplish. For instance "petals" are a variety of nanite-infused flowers whose petals send the user into a very trippy virtual reality when consumed; one popular variety makes the user think his hand has detached itself and is running away.
• Exalted not only has fantastic drugs, but it also has fantastic ways to produce mundane drugs. Namely, the Beasts of Resplendent Liquid, immortal dinosaur-like beasts engineered in the First Age by a Twilight Caste bioengineer. They feed on pharmaceutically helpful plants and ferment the plants into an associated medicine. The Guild, however, got their hands on the Beasts, and now mainly put them to work on poppy fields so they can corner the heroin market.
• GURPS Technomancer has two magic-enhancing drugs. "Spelljack", which is powdered powerstone mixed with cocaine, and PHTP, which is a treated version of the chemical that allows humans to control magic harvested from the brains of mages.
• Hc Svnt Dracones features ordinary stims, which do everything from boosting reflexes to replacing sleep, and are inhaled and legal. And then there's Vitae, a miracle compound that keeps flesh alive and vital regardless of lapses in infrastructure (i.e. gaping holes in your body). Taking regular infusions of Vitae gives you a ton of energy and makes you immune to poisons and allows you to ignore a lot of damage, but unless you have a very expensive implant that's only available to loyal Progenitus employees and carefully regulates the Vitae that durability comes at the cost of your sanity. Unregulated Vitae users have a tendency towards horrific self-mutilation.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Blinkmoth serum (an extract made from blinkmoths, artificial insects from Mirrodin) is apparently addictive is Venser in Quest for Karn is of any indication.
  • In the mafia set New Capenna there's Halo, a luminous oil made from angels, dead or alive. Creative insists its not meant to be a drug analogue, but in the actual narrative characters are shown to be addicted to it, with Vivien even claiming it essentially clouds the mind with addiction. Overall, it is also used as a fuel and protection against the phyrexians, so it can be said to be analogous to a mixture of angel dust, steroids, alcohol (this is fantasy-Prohibition we're talking about) and gasoline.
• Myriad Song has several, many are lethal to species other than the one they're designed for, such as the Towser drug Snowblind. And then there's Charas, produced by Morphir that have eaten brains and containing absorbed memories, occasionally smokers come off a trip with new skills.
• Over the Edge has several imaginary designer drugs such as Slo Mo, which gives the impression that time has slowed down.
• Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution has several drugs that unlock, suppress, or otherwise affect psionic powers, in addition to several combat drugs that don't exist.
• The future world of Shadowrun has come up with a lot of these. Perhaps the most interesting is "deepweed", an Awakened form of seaweed that causes you to astrally perceive when eaten… whether you want to or not. Then there's BTL (short for "Better Than Life") chips/programs, which come in varieties ranging from "pornography" to "emotional overload" to "deliberate synthesia".
  • A good chunk of the game's Fourth Edition metaplot involved the hot new drug on the market, Tempo, which allowed the Ghost Cartels to gain a foothold. Its effects include euphoria, hallucinations, astral perception... and marking you for possession by Shadow Spirits.
• Transhuman Space has nanodrugs. Nanodrugs that affect someone's brain chemistry (including positive effects like increased mental stability or improved memory as well as hallucinogens and narcotics) are called brainbugs.
• Unknown Armies features the magical school of Narco-Alchemy, which allows an adept to apply the principles of alchemy to the drug trade. There's a lot of fantastic drugs involved.
• Both Vampire: The Masquerade Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Requiem go for vampire blood as a drug. Humans who take it can look forward to halted aging and a measure of supernatural power, but risk getting addicted and being "blood bound," entering a state where no matter how much they hate the vampire, they can't raise a hand to harm them.
  • In various sourcebooks for Mage: The Ascension, there are examples of magically created drugs, from the enchanted tabs of LSD, to various Progenitor created drugs that are intended to have effects ranging from making the user aware of all things within a set area, more likely to believe certain realities, or become completely incapable of feeling emotions. Of course, this being Mage, players are able to make any kind of magical fantasy drug they want. Crack that turns you into fire? Go for it! Mushrooms that makes any hallucinations real? Of course! Drugs that make you aware of how every action you take has been taken before and it's all been codified by magical beings who observe you invisibly? Sure.
  • Additionally, the blood of other supernatural creatures has various effects on vampires in Vampire: The Masquerade: werewolf blood is analogous to PCP, for instance, while mage and fairy blood act as powerful hallucinogens.
  • The Mythologies sourcebook for Requiem actually introduces a drug specifically for vampires—Solace. It's injected via the tongue, made partly from the blood of teenaged "cutters", and allows the vampire to temporarily feel like they're alive again. It's extremely addictive.
  • Requiem also has lacrima, a "blood wine" formed by mixing fresh blood with a strange congealed sap extruded from plants fed on vampire blood.
  • A suggested plot hook in Changeling: The Lost is the discovery of a goblin fruit known as "bloodroot", which has vampire-only narcotic properties, and the potential havoc that can ensue as unscrupulous changelings begin messing with vampire society and vampires, in turn, discover there is a drug they can actually feel and come hunting for it in turn. The "Rites of Spring" sourcebook also notes that a shot of Glamour (the "mana" of changelings) has the same general effects as Solace — it makes a vampire feel alive again.
  • One running plot for the Orpheus line involved "pigment," a special type of heroin created by exposure to ghostly matter. Those who overdosed on it became their own special type of ghost—a "Hue," which could use Spite with reduced penalty.
• Warhammer 40,000 features 'combat drugs' as options on several units, sometimes taken voluntarily. In-universe, these are basically a mix of stimulants, painkillers, and more exotic chemicals intended to keep a soldier going for as long as possible before dying. Usually in a berserk rage (the most common name for drugs inducing this condition being "frenzon"). The Ciaphas Cain novels mention the names of several drugs: 'slaught, psychon, blissout, and others.
  • The most prolific users of combat drugs are the Eversor Assassins, who are turned into monsters with them and sent to destroy someone.
  • Some background materials imply that the Emperor's Children, a legion of the settings worst abusers of combat drugs, manufacture those drugs from the basic components from broken-down human bodies.
  • Combat drugs aside, there are several recreational drugs that exist in the background as well. The most ubiquitous being the narcotic lho-sticks, which are smoked like a cigarette and apparently an opiate. Others include obscura, gladstones, and grinweed. Another example that plays the trope much straighter is flects, which are warp-saturated bits of broken glass, "used" simply by looking into them; keep in mind that since they are tainted by the warp, flects are a much more insidious example than most others on this page…
  • The urban gang-warfare spinoff game Necromunda allows outlaw gangs to buy and use a variety of exotic drugs, including the frenzy-inducing 'slaught, "spook", which confers minor psychic powers at the price of probable mental and spiritual damage, and the powerful Icrotic Slime, which is really a brain-eating alien parasite that induces euphoria and considerable physical enhancements in its host to discourage removal (the user or an associate has to remove it before it encysts and begins feeding).

Video Games

• Afraid of Monsters: "Remedy", the painkiller David's addicted to, is apparently quite powerful. So powerful, it gives you nightmares that can actually kill you!
• According to Yale in Episode 6 of Ambition, Paxwic is a new drug developed to subdue prisoners by making them blissed-out and non-violent. Angie was pursuing a study showing that Paxwic also has the effect of destroying the subject's critical thinking ability, which would make her enemies with the manufacturer Somaplex if her paper on the side effects were to be published. Later, we learn that Ted was injected with an ominously labeled faulty batch of Paxwic which could have heightened his anxiety just before he woke up to his blood-splattered apartment.
• Aven Colony has 'Enhancers' which can be used to increase the health, happiness and social compliance of colonists.
• Black Lotus is mentioned in passing several times in Baldur's Gate II — a backroom in the Cornet Inn suggests that it's an Opium Analog, and for a very mercantile city, Amn forbid the selling of it.
• Batman: Arkham Series:
  • Batman: Arkham Asylum shows Bane using Venom (detailed above in Comic Books), while also introducing Titan, a supposedly improved version of Venom that the Joker is working on inside the titular asylum. Its effects are even more dramatic, not just bulking up victims but turning them into misshapen monstrosities (Titan goons with odd-sized arms are common, and the Joker himself ends up with bones protruding from his flesh after taking a dose). In Batman: Arkham City, it turns out that Titan causes severe blood poisoning, which actually ends up killing the Joker for real.
  • Batman: Arkham Origins introduces TN-1, the precursor to Titan, which causes brain damage (primarily to the memory centers of the mind) as a side-effect. This is used to Retcon Bane's appearance in Asylum and City; in Origins he's similar to his comics counterpart (a Genius Bruiser who's larger than normal men but not too unrealistic), but after taking TN-1, he turns into a walking mountain of muscle and seems to lose some brainpower in the process. It also causes him to forget that he'd figured out Batman's secret identity, which was a plot point in Origins but was never acknowledged in Asylum or City.
• BioShock had ADAM and Plasmids. These allowed people to alter there genetic code providing improvements ranging from sculpted muscles to super powers. The underlying ADAM substance that all of it was built on proved to be extremely physically addictive being that it replaced normal cells with unstable stem cells which needed to be regularly replaced. In withdrawal the ADAM stem cells breakdown turning to benign or malignant growths in addition to causing physical and mental deterioration with prolonged use, which helped spark a Civil War. By the time the player arrives, Rapture is populated almost exclusively with ADAM-crazy slicers.
• City of Heroes has quite a few:
  • Superadine or "Supes" is the drug of choice amongst initiates into the Trolls, as it gives them a high and super strength, as well as mutates their bodies into the green-skinned and horned mobs that players encounter. It's derived from a Super-Soldier serum that the United States used during World War II.
  • Shift is used by the Lost to convert people to their cause and usher in a new race of Ritki born on Earth.
  • Rage is manufactured by the Tsoo as a new designer drug, with nasty side-effects if used in concert with Superadine.
  • Excelsior is used by the Freakshow and allows them to augment their bodies with scrapyard cybernetic enhancements as well as giving them super strength and a narcotic high.
  • Fixadine or "Crush" is the Praetorian Earth version of Superadine, with similar addictive qualities and mutations.
• In "Episode 2: Memory" of Code 7 you learn about Lime or Lissler's Methamphetamine, a more addicting and dangerous version of meth. It's usually taken using breathers, devices for inhaling airborne drugs. It's creator, Lissler, made billions off of it, but eventually got dismembered by one of his "customers".
• Cruelty Squad:
  • Whatever the hell the police chief in Androgen Assault has been smoking, the mission briefing blames it for his current state of mind. It turns out that it's his state of body that's the more relevant problem, given that he is now a psychopathic, ranting zombie blown into something resembling a bouncy castle of flesh who spits acid at people.
  • There's an implication that Biocurrency can serve as this, as your very first target is more interested in screaming about investing in Biocurrencies, becoming God, "vomiting blood all over his office", and has a noticeably deformed face.
  • The yuppies in Neuron Activator regularly talk about ingesting Gore, some kind of party drug that overclocks your biological processes. Side effects include exploding into agonized meat.
• Crying Suns has Special-H, which makes people feel better about living in a utopian society where A.I.s run everything and nothing is expected of them. It's extremely addictive: one use gets you hooked for life, and your future children as well.
• Cyberpunk 2077 has "braindance", a combination of drugs and virtual reality that allows users to live out the lives of someone else while in use. Those living below the poverty line often become addicted to braindance as they crave to live out a life more ideal than their own.
• Deep Rock Galactic: Red Sugar, a glowy crystalline mineral that can be found anywhere in Hoxxes IV, seems to have several morphine-esque traits, in that it's a very good painkiller but an addictive one, with other properties that make the dwarves quite happy to find it (especially after injury). It has other properties unique to itself, however, like a few undisclosed healing ones and the fact it's apparently genuinely tasty to the dwarven palate (with dwarves casually ordering "Glyphid Slammer, Red Sugar on top!" at the bar). It's also implied to be one of the active ingredients in the combat stim-slash-stout beer Red Rock Blaster.
• In Detroit: Become Human there exists a drug called "red ice". The drug's main ingredient is thirium, which also happens to be a vital component in the production of the "blue blood" which all androids require to operate.
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • Deus Ex has Zyme, the drug of choice for teenage rebels and junkies in 2052, in game it just gives you the effect of at least a dozen bottles of alcohol (wobbly and blurry vision — although presumably the effect is more potent on normal humans who don't have nanoaugmentations to quickly flush the drug from their system) the Shifter game mod allows you to use it for temporary bullet time (normal effects still come after it).
  • The Nameless Mod has Melk (TM), it has religious uses with the Goat cult, who have fountains of the stuff that allow their high priest to resurrect herself every time she is killed, until they are shut off There is also crystal melk, which functions just like Zyme in the original game.
  • Deus Ex: Invisible War introduces Black Market Biomods, which have elements of this. They're illegal, and supposedly have negative effects on some people (fortunately, your character is not one of those unlucky people). Complete with messages warning parents about the dangers. Plus, they're only sold by cyborgs in dark alleys.
  • In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Neon is a recreational drug on the streets of Prague, which is inhaled and causes the user to vividly hallucinate rich colors. Apparently, it does not react well with neuropozyne though, and causes lethal seizures when the two drugs are combined in the same system.
• Disco Elysium runs with a downplayed take. The game uses a combination of real-world drugs (most prominently alcohol and amphetamines) and otherworldly drugs, which aren't especially strange but also don't exist in the real world.
  • The most explicitly magical "drug" in the game is The Pale, a field of complete breakdown of reality that surrounds countries and continents, has properties that drive people insane, cause them to lose their memories or gain the memories of others, causes them to lose the ability to sleep, and can also make them addicted and crave a return to it. It is also believed by some to have health-giving effects - alcohol can be Pale-aged (though this doesn't appear to change its effects) and a book of natural remedies you can find suggests the Pale has medicinal properties.
  • Pyrholidon, the drug which boosts your PSY stat, is a purple liquid that was invented as an anti-radiation drug, but is mostly taken for its psychedelic side-effects. It also has some less desirable side-effects, which show up through prolonged abuse, such as addiction, insomnia and making the whites of your eyes turn yellow. As a psychedelic, its effects are subtle, more like the psychedelic effects of real-life ecstasy or marijuana — heightened empathy, social sensitivity, imagination and feelings of emotional closeness and warmth, but no visuals (Harry's Electrochemistry skill describes seeing the world with "fire" around the edges, but also clarifies that it's actually just a metaphor for the subtle way the drug affects Harry's perceptions of the world as filled with warmth). According to the developers, pyrholidon is inspired by Taren (aprofene), an anticholinogenic drug in the pyridophen family used by the Soviet military as a purported anti-radiation drug. It was left behind in massive quantities in Estonia after the Soviets withdrew, and became a favorite abusable drug of hippies and punks due to its low cost, long-lasting effects, and ability to cause overpowering hallucinations, insomnia and conversations with inanimate objects. However, Taren is a deliriant and, like all deliriants, tends to cause terrifying experiences with meaningless, feverish hallucinations indistinguishable from reality; while pyrholidon is only ever described as a 'psychedelic' and is known for making the world seem softer, kinder and more profound.
  • The basic Health healing item is Nosaphed, an unregulated drug that is stored in a nasal spray canister. It presumably is a decongestant and mild stimulant — the anodic music kids lie that they use it for their stuffy noses while hoarding it to use in making amphetamines. In the real world, the most common raw ingredient for homemade methamphetamine is over-the-counter pseudoephedrine tablets, a mild stimulant and decongestant sold as cold medicine — an obscure Encyclopedia check in the Church will inform you that Nosaphed's active ingredient is pseudoephedrine. However, in the game, it is used by your character for aches and pains. In the real world, pseudoephedrine doesn't lessen pain (except in your sinuses), but it can make it easier to ignore it (if only because you're distracted by the jitters and heart palpitations).
  • Drouamine is a "really good painkiller". We are told it is opioid-derived and it's apparently strong enough to make your player character capable of running on a barely treated broken leg, but it can be bought over the counter legally, and your main character can take it without apparent cravings or addictive effects, which is unusual considering the addictiveness of opioids and the player character's behaviour towards every other even slightly mind-altering substance in the game. A character encountered very late in the game is addicted to Drouamine and it is portrayed as a typical opioid addiction, but he's been using it constantly for decades to self-medicate his own misery, and your character is using it over the course of a few days to medicate actual physical pain.
  • Magnesium is used to boost Morale. It is said to have mood-altering, energy-boosting effects... although, the person who says it has these effects is Cuno, who may just be talking nonsense. In the real world, magnesium is taken for nervous twitches, restless legs, and jitters caused by withdrawal from depressant drugs or taking a lot of stimulant ones. Alcoholics, which your player character is, are often deficient in magnesium, and since Morale is to do with your player character's psychological resistance to his own depression, it could be that magnesium's powers are just the placebo effect of an alcoholic finding a deficiency of one substance to blame all his problems on. (The 'Magnesium-Based Lifeform' Thought allows you to become delusionally convinced that taking enough Magnesium will allow you to ascend to the next phase of human evolution.)
  • If Kim starts trying to convince Acele to reveal what drug she is on, he'll start acting like he's "gotta hit that D" (diamorphine — better known in our world as heroin), and Acele will dismiss it as everyone now just does "hunch", or B-hydroxy-phenothiazine, a drug she describes as 'ten times stronger and waaaaaay more lethal'. Even your Electrochemistry stat calls it 'the dark lord, put into chemical form' and refuses to suggest you use it. Phenothiazine is a drug that exists in real life as the stem from which the typical antipsychotics are derived - a class of drugs known for side effects that scare even heavy drug users that are sometimes combined with opioids to potentiate the effects. 'B-hydroxy' presumably comes from B-hydroxyfentanyl, a fentanyl analog commonly abused in Estonia. This fits thematically with the idea of it being a scarier version of heroin, but if it existed, b-hydroxy-phenothiazine would just be an antipsychotic.
  • At one point, a character becomes addicted to an unknown neurotoxic drug secreted by an insect. The drug appears to help the insect maintain a Perception Filter and appears to do something to the oxytocin system, making people feel profound sensations of love and sexual desire, but, in the long term, making them emotionally erratic and incoherent.
  • Kings of Revachol's past used to use a form of cocaine so astonishingly pure that it was magenta in color. You can point out that if it was that pure, it shouldn't be magenta, but the game's narration will tell you off for being a pedant. (This may be a reference to the famous blue crystal meth in Breaking Bad — pure meth is white in color, but the series used blue to make Walt's stuff visually distinctive, so street meth is now usually dyed blue because of the perception created by the series.)
• In the Divine Divinity series:
  • The Drudanae plant is smoked recreationally and is sometimes banned as an addictive narcotic. It's said to have uses in healing salves, is used for Ritual Magic in Divinity II, and helps a Dream Walker use his powers in Divinity: Original Sin II, but can also produce Addled Addicts.
  • In Divinity: Original Sin II, the Blackroot plant, when properly prepared, can produce a hallucinogenic smoke that draws Godwoken into a Mental World and helps them awaken their powers. For non-Godwoken, the smoke is deadly.
• Instead of the benign Mana potions found in other games, Dragon Age features lyrium, an addictive mineral that can either be inhaled as a powder or made into elixirs. Side effects include delusions, paranoia, dementia, obsessive behavior, hallucinations, dry mouth… higher doses or exposure to large amounts of naturally occurring lyrium can cause overdose-like symptoms along the lines of brain damage and death.
  • The pure lyrium idol in Dragon Age II is responsible for Bartrand and Meredith both going insane. The latter is a Templar, and thus already reliant on lyrium to power her anti-magic abilities. Then Dragon Age: Inquisition reveals that red lyrium like the idol is infected with the Blight.
  • Offhandedly mentioned is Aquae Lucidius, a liquor whose ingredients include wyvern poison. It's apparently popular among Orlesian nobility (including the Empress herself). According to Tallis, it'll make you see purple dragons for days. The codex entry has these testimonies:
    "I feel confused but happy!"
    "It was as though my soul took wing and floated about my head."
    "I had a vision of my great-grandmother and found it oddly arousing."
    "I can see through time!"
• The nastier effects of lyrium usage are shown in even greater degree in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Cullen struggles throughout the game with lyrium withdrawal, since he stopped taking lyrium after leaving the Order. He also tries to discourage a Warrior Inquisitor from becoming a Templar since that means taking lyrium. And that's not getting into Red Lyrium, a far more potent variety which was used in the above-mentioned idol's creation. As Varric puts it red lyrium is lyrium like a dragon is a lizard. Regular lyrium is only dangerous if it's ingested. Just being near red lyrium is dangerous enough, let alone consuming it. Red lyrium is normal lyrium tainted by the Blight... which means that lyrium is technically alive, since minerals aren't affected by the Blight. Complete DLC The Descent and you learn the truth: lyrium is alive, as in it's the blood of the ancient and humongous Titans that lie dormant deep, deep underground.
• Elden Ring:
  • Perfumer aromatics. Perfumers acted as doctors in times of peace and chemical weapons experts in times of war, and their aromatics acted as anything from normal medication to performance-enhancing drugs (along with poisons and explosives, which obviously weren't meant to be ingested). Most perfumers stick to using their aromatics as medicine and buff with the Uplifting Aromatic (boosts allied attack and defense against one attack), but Depraved Perfumers, who practice their art purely to increase their own power and take their own perfumes, have invented the Bloodboil (increase damage dealt and taken) and Ironjar (turns the body to steel, and requires fragments of Living Jars- which, mind you, are fully sapient beings- to make) Aromatics.
  • Seluvis's potions are fantasy date rape drugs squared; taking them will turn the drinker into a mindless puppet... and yes, it's implied he does do what you're thinking he does with his puppets. Seluvis tries to make Nepheli Loux into a puppet through your help (though you don't have to give her the potion—give it to Gideon and he'll get rid of it, give it to the Dung Eater and you've made the Lands Between a better place), and his ultimate goal is to craft a potion strong enough to make his mistress Ranni into a puppet. He believes the Amber Draught he crafts at the end of his quest will do the trick, but it can't be confirmed because Ranni is smarter than him and won't take the drink, instead killing you on the spot if you offer.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The series has a number of recurring fantastic drugs: a list can be found here. Additionally, there are a number of fantastic alcoholic beverages as well.
  • Most prominently, there is Moon Sugar (a white crystalline powder similar to real world cocaine) and its derivative, Skooma. It can often be found in bandit and smuggler dens and can be sold for a nice profit to less-than-scrupulous traders. A few Game Mods allow you to produce Skooma out of raw Moon Sugar, which can then be sold for even more. Most honest merchants will refuse to barter with you if you have either substance on you, though you can drop it on the ground, conduct your business, and pick it right back up if you want. The Khajiit race is seen as particularly susceptible to Moon Sugar and Skooma addiction, thanks to how prevalent the substances are in their culture, though they also supposedly have a higher tolerance for Moon Sugar than other races because they ingest it in small amounts every day; in fact, Moon Sugar is such a common ingredient in their native cuisine that non-Khajiit are advised to exercise caution when eating Khajiiti food. In Morrowind, these substances can only be sold to Khajiiti traders.
  • The Argonians, a race of Lizard Folk, worship the Hist, a race of sapient and possibly omniscient trees native to their swampy homeland of Black Marsh. Young Argonians drink the sap of the Hist trees to grow, and the Hist can communicate with the Argonians via visions transmitted in the sap. However, if a non-Argonian drinks the sap, or if the sap is somehow tainted, it can result in extreme hallucinations and intense bloodlust. (This can be seen in the Fighters' Guild questline in Oblivion.)
  • A fungus known only to grow in the armpits of Giants is said to be a powerful narcotic.
  • Morrowind, in addition to Moon Sugar and Skooma, also has Hackle-Lo Leaf, a plant native to Vvardenfell's Grazelands. It is chewed by the native Dunmer for its energizing properties and can be brewed into Restore Fatigue potions, giving it similarities to real world coca leaves and tobacco.
  • Skyrim adds Sleeping Tree Sap, an extract of a glowing tree that makes you feel healthy, but is a hallucinogenic that slows you down.
• Escape Velocity Nova's official timeline mentions FATE, a "highly addictive narcotic" created accidentally when scientists tried to use a spaceborne chemical called TCTLIDS to create medicines. The drug does not appear in the game proper, however.
  • A fan-made sequel has 324-florazine iodase (street name "stardust"), which is a regulated but legal antidepressant for humans, and an illegal drug for several alien species.
• Even For Eternia: Moon Dust is a substance that can be used to make magic water for restoring MP. Unfortunately, it is also highly addictive and drives people insane, which is why most countries banned its use for purposes other than magic water. One sidequest involves stopping a group of Moon Dust smugglers.
• Fallen London has "prisoner's honey" which transports you physically into a Dream Land. It's regulated, but legal. But stay away from red honey, which is one of the few things that's outright illegal in Fallen London. Red honey lets you enter somebody else's memories and mess around. And then there's Cardinal's Honey, which thrusts you into dreams of the dead; this is such a massive backfire it's used as an especially awful poison more than a drug.
  • One subplot in Sunless Sea involves sphinxstone, which turns out to be this for Genii Locorum, or at least for the Bazaar. Also, for Neathers, sunlight is a dangerously addictive experience that produces feelings of euphoria even as you burn to ashes. Smugglers visit the surface with special mirror-lined boxes to bring it back to the Neath.
• The Fallout series features a wide array of drugs (called chems in universe) that have major stat boosts but come with the risk of addiction and withdrawal symptoms. Many of them have very clear real-life analogs (e.g., Buffout, which boosts strength and endurance, is a steroid, mentats, which boost intelligence and are often taken by students, are adderall, and psycho, which boosts damage but causes some heavy bloodlust seems to be based on the amphetamines given to soldiers in wartime) while some are weirder (e.g., Cateye, which grants night vision, and X-Cell, which boosts all stats).
  • Fallout 3 had to change the name of a drug morphine to 'Med-X' in order to keep distribution in certain countries. A cry against 'censorship' went out, but real life drug names were never part of the Fallout franchise before, and Bethesda pretty much designed them to act like magic potions anyway, and this one in particular doesn't realistically simulate morphine. Also, in Fallout 3, a Ghoul comes up with a way to come up with a drug that can actually affect his kind. Ghouls barely feel anything from Jet, so he cooks up a way to turn it into Ultrajet. Put simply, Ultrajet has serious and potentially permanent consequences on a human.
  • Some products were addictive in some but not all games they showed up in. Ordinary Nuka-Cola, for instance, was addictive in the first two games and Tactics but not in 3 or New Vegas (granted, it was a rather benign addiction — all withdrawal did was tell you that you craved another Nuka-Cola — and there are several references and allusions to it in 3). The same is true for Radaway, though with a slightly harsher addiction and no mention at all in later games.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII occasionally dips into this with Mako. In combination with Jenova cells it gives people superhuman abilities and glowing eyes — when exposed to high levels souls become intertwined and a psychedelic Vision Quest results. It's also poisonous, physically addictive, and the Mako therapy use is very bad for one's mental health. Remake also has a throwaway line referencing "Mako junkies".
  • Final Fantasy XII has an item called Demon Drink which is described as extremely addictive.
  • Final Fantasy XIV:
    • Fogweed is referenced for the in-game ashtray item, likely being a stand-in for cannabis or tobacco, or both
    • There are references to "somnus", a highly addictive herb. The introductory cutscene for players starting in Ul'dah has a merchant stopped and inspected for the drug before being blindsided by the local beast tribe, while one of the job quests for Gunbreakers deals with a parent so addicted to somnus that they are willing to sell off their children for a dose.
    • Milkroot is a hallucinogenic substance derived from the sap of ochus. It's apparently popular among the sylphs, as you have to get some as a gift for the sylphs of Little Solace during the main story quest for A Realm Reborn.
• In Final Fight Streetwise a drug called "GLOW" is spreading through the city. GLOW users eventually turn extremely violent, wandering the streets like zombies.
• The Duotine that Fran Bow takes, though its actual effects are never elaborated upon. A quick check in a covered box in the asylum's basement says that the pills might not actually be Duotine since some of the bottles' labels are stated to have been scraped off, and a note in the box shows that a certain patient's dosage had a Duotine label placed on it "to look like an approved variant of Duotine". Later conversations imply that the pills might not even be a drug to begin with.
• In GARAGE: Bad Dream Adventure, there exists a drug known as Nitro.Not much is known about it, Chen seems to be dependent on it. A little too dependent, as shortly after you give some to him, he dies.
• Dream Leaf in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn is an iridescent tree leaf from a semi-sentient (?) tree that acts as a sedative and gives the user good dreams. It is typically used is by old people and insomniacs. In war-torn Border Town, it is taken recreationally by those who want to dream of the good old days or by our heroes, to access the Haures summon in the blocked-off part of town. When the Dream Tree is under attack by the ghostly monster Sludge, its leaves instead induce nightmares.
• The Gothic series has swampweed. While it works mostly like marijuana in that it is smoked in joints and affects perception, magic users can benefit from its side effects to enter a trance-like state required for certain magical endeavors. In particular, one of the storyline quests in Gothic 2 requires a priest of each of the three main gods of Myrtana to enter in this trance state with joints of swampweed to help the Eye of Innos regain its power.
• Half the plot of Grand Theft Auto III revolves around the Colombian Cartel flooding Liberty City with a new drug called SPANK, a perverse cross between cocaine and meth. It seems to be the new 'party drug' for most of Liberty's residents, but extended use can turn its users into psychopathic suicide bombers. The Mafia and Yakuza won't deal with the stuff, but other gangs, like the Triads and The Yardies, have no such qualms.
• The city of Billion in Gungrave is overrun with crime and a mysterious drug known only as "seed". It's highly addictive and gives the user increased resilience and strength, along with lowered inhibitions and euphoria. However, it eventually drives the user insane and leads to death. Turns out that seed is really derived from a malevolent race of alien parasites whose only reason to live is to reproduce by taking control of other lifeforms. And it's used in the technology that brought the protagonist back from death and nearly all the enemies he fights throughout the series.
• Haze has Nectar, which makes soldiers easier to control by concealing how much of a Crapsack World they're in (and how much of that they're responsible for). Withdrawal is really bad.
• Heavy Rain has triptocaine, a drug that one of the main characters, Norman Jayden, is addicted to. It's up to the player whether he will use it or not. Norman is only addicted to triptocaine because he abuses it to suppress the symptoms of another addiction he has: ARI, his virtual reality sunglasses that can be very dangerous with overuse and really screw with your perception of reality. Near the end of the game, keeping them on too long will make his eyes bleed, and further use will kill him.
• The ingredient you get for helping Lil' Smoke in Hell Pie is a "pink powder", a drug that is obviously meant to be a stand-in for cocaine.
• Indivisible: The streets of Tai Krung City are being flooded with the drug Ohma. Ohma was originally used in small doses by practitioners of ancient arts in special ceremonies to achieve a higher state of consciousness and further their connection to the gods. Unfortunately, Mara began selling the stuff to the masses for money, resulting in Ohma addicts littering the streets.
• In Injustice: Gods Among Us, there's "5-U-93-R", a special pill developed that would grant normal humans superhuman (re:Kryptonian) physiology. Many of Batman's Insurrgency uses this to help even the odds and it's still used in the time of Injustice 2.
• Katana ZERO: A major plot point/gameplay mechanic is Chronos, a drug that screws with your perception of time and gives you minor precognitive abilities. Your character was one of several test subjects given Chronos as part of a Super-Soldier program in the Cromag War. Your targets are all people involved with its creation and post-war distribution on the black market; the government is sending you after them because they realize how dangerous Chronos is and are trying to destroy it and everything related to it, while silencing anyone who could expose its existence... including you once You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.
• Kingdom of Loathing has goofballs, which gives you a nice 20% Muscle and Moxie boost that lasts 10 adventures. It's the withdrawal debuff that gets you, though — you lose 10% of all your stats until the game considers that you have officially kicked the addiction after going around with the debuff for 30 adventures. Also, the dealer that gives you the first bottle for free subsequently increase the price of each bottle by 1000 meat with each purchase.
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: The ongoing disturbance in the Eldin region is the spread of a new food source among the Gorons known as Marbled Rock Roast. It's highly addictive, making its eaters obsessed with doing nothing but getting more and aggressive towards anyone who might get in the way of their supply. Fortunately it's not as palatable to the young or elderly, so they're unaffected, but that still leaves the majority of Goron society under its thrall.
• LISA has a drug also called Joy, it works as a painkiller which on use, ups the persons defenses and attack capabilities in a pinch, at the cost of mutating into a hideous monster after consistent use of it. The worst part being that two of the playable characters already start off with Joy-Addictions, leaving you knowing what will happen to them.
• Live A Live: In the Near Future chapter, Matango is the alcohol/drug of choice in Akira's town. It has the power to amplify psychic powers, but too much of it kills someone from the mental overload. Lawless naturally consumes a ton to kickstart the Steel Titan.
• Mass Effect:
  • Red sand, a derivative of element zero, gives the user temporary biotic powers, or enhances them if the user is a biotic. Other effects are unknown but it's implied to be extremely addictive and causes nasty psychological side effects, making it a banned substance across nearly all of Citadel space. It's legal on Illium though, provided one has acquired a license to sell it.
  • Hallex, seen in Samara's loyalty mission, causes euphoria and heightened senses. It's probably one of many drugs that originate on alien worlds.
• The plot of Max Payne revolves around Valkyr, colloquially known as "V", a PCP-like drug originally developed as a Super Serum for the military, but abandoned when it turned out to be addictive Psycho Serum, spurring the manufacturer to recoup their losses by selling the stuff to the mob, who then turned it loose on the streets. V also appears to have hallucinogenic properties, sending the titular hero on a really bad trip when he gets forcibly dosed up with it at one point.
• Mega Man Battle Network (and its anime, MegaMan NT Warrior) has Dark Chips, which crosses Fantastic Drugs with The Corruption. Dark Chips are powerful weapons used by Navis who are desperate or power-hungry, but which turn the user evil and slowly delete their data. This forces them to keep using Dark Chips to momentarily replace the data, but constant use eventually kills the Navi entirely.
• Metal Gear Ac!d has ACUA, an experimental combat drug that boosts strength and kills pain. It also plugs the user's mind straight into that of the psychic Hive Queen, theoretically allowing her to coordinate tens of thousands of people as one organism from her Metal Gear. And is quite hallucinogenic (dissociation from reality, disorientation and visual trails are what we see).
• Monster Hunter has Felvine, which Felynes and Melynxes go crazy over, i.e. it's the series' equivalent of catnip. If you have it in your inventory, Melynxes will prioritize stealing it over anything else. You can also make Felvine Bombs, which when detonated on a monster causes any nearby cats to attack it, but if you hit one of said cats with the bomb, they will instead go into a drunken stupor.
• Nexus Clash has Blood Ice and Soul Ice, handy and useful powerups that sap the Karma Meter of anyone who uses them. Ices are made almost exclusively by Defiler Demons by wounding and killing other player characters — the greater the harm, the greater the volume of Ice created.
• In the world of Overwatch exists "Hogdrogen", a pressurized chemical mixture created by the Junkers of the post-apocalyptic Australian outback, functionally designed to counteract the effects of radiation exposure, but also heavily implied to be used recreationally as well. Roadhog uses this for his "Take a Breather" ability, inhaling a canister of the stuff to heal up his (already substantially large) health bar.
• Pillars of Eternity has a few of these; they're mostly treated neutrally. Companions Edér and Hiravias are casual users, Zahua goes through the game pretty much constantly stoned, and the player can use them as a Booze-Based Buff if they're mindful of the crash. The major ones are:
  • Whiteleaf is some sort of tobacco/marijuana analogue that "grants a feeling of calm alongside an intense lethargy".
  • Snowcaps are hallucinogenic mushrooms; they're favored by mystics like Zahua for the visions they can grant, but Edér and Hiravias mention occasionally indulging.
  • Svef is treated as a harder drug, said to allow the user to see their own soul, and granting a "sense of urgency and meaning". It seems to be a cocaine analogue, with drug dealers who happily deal in other drugs not willing to carry it.
• Project Eden has an unnamed (?) drug which increases a user's strength and toughness but also transforms them into hideous monsters.
• Rimworld: The game includes some real drugs with new names, but also Luciferium, which can heal permanent injuries and chronic health conditions that are untreatable with other medicine, but the pawn has to take it for the rest of their life, which will be 6.66 days if another dose isn't consumed.
• In Saints Row 2, the Sons of Samedi manufacture Loa Dust, which is popular amongst the potheads at college. Part of the Saints' campaign against the Sons is in figuring out how to make it themselves, then stealing the competition's market.
• In Shadow Warrior 2, Compound 61 was created in a laboratory, designed to give people insightful visions. It was later "cut" with other drugs and sold on the streets as Shade, which is known to cause euphoria, mild hallucinations, anxiety release and dependency. Since Shade's main ingredient is the supernatural "Crude" from the Collision between the human and the demon worlds, it also has other side effects, such as turning you into a demon if you use it too much.
• Shin Megami Tensei IV has the Red Pills produced by the Ashura-kai, which are used to quell the demons' craving for human flesh — seems harmless enough, right? Well, if a human consumes a Red Pill, they transform into a demon. The real kicker is that Red Pills are made by harvesting neurotransmitters from the brains of kidnapped and imprisoned humans in a secret underground facility.
• Silent Hill has the hallucinogenic White Claudia/PTV.
• Sly 2: Band of Thieves has Spice, harvested from Indian flowers. In large amounts, it causes uncontrollable rage and hatred in the user, acting a little like G-rated PCP.
• StarCraft II introduces Terrazine, a purple gas that has hallucinogenic properties on Protoss, as well as increasing psionic potential when in use. It is also highly addictive. It can be used by Terrans, and is said to cause them to develop psionic powers, but also causes insanity when overdosing.
  Artanis: I hope none of the daelaam get into Terrazine while we're on Slayn. It is such a difficult habit to break.
• Starfield has a wide variety of stat-boosting drugs, some stated to be addictive, others with undisclosed side effects. For example, Heart+ briefly improves health and damage resistance, but if you take too much, then your carrying capacity drops.
• In Stella Glow, the protagonist's party runs into mercenaries high on a drug called "nopium" on their journey to Port Noir in search of one of the Witches. When ingested, it grants enhanced strength and endurance, but also eats away at the user's mind, driving them insane. They later find out that the nopium trade is the main reason for the town's prosperity, and Port Noir's mayor is forcing the Wind Witch to keep the windmill running in order to continue to harvest the stuff. The mayor sends more of the nopium-addled soldiers after them to try to keep them from talking.
• Styx: Master of Shadows has processed amber, with amber being the liquid sap of the world tree and double as Mana for Styx to use his various abilities. Though officially prohibited, amber was seen widely traded and smuggled in various parts of Akenash, providing a justified source of bottles of amber lying about or being carried around for Styx to steal. The sequel, Styx: Shards of Darkness reveals that after the Fall of Akenash, the primary source of Amber is the Dark Elves, who juice goblins to get their fix!
  • It isn't described what drinking amber does to non-magic using humans, but human amber-users are frequently shown vomiting.
  • It is suggested that consumable amber induces certain hallucinogenic effects for human users. When human enemies briefly see or hear something moving in the corner (Styx), but then lose perception before they get suspicious, they may say "(Bleep), and I didn't even take any amber..." and dismiss it as themselves seeing or hearing things.
• TAGAP has the titular drug, which stands for "Tissue-Augmenting Green Addictive Pill" and stands somewhere between this trope, Super Serum and Psycho Serum. It allows incredible resilience and physical prowess, a nigh-instantaneous Healing Factor (that, however, depletes the drug in the user's bloodstream) and, if "overdosed", even more enhanced speed and reflexes (as well as visual distortions and happy hallucinations of bright flowers and green penguins). The "Psycho" part comes from the fact that, unless you've been specifically engineered to curb the negative effects, your intelligence is drained and you become noticeably more vulnerable to mind control.
• The Medic in Team Fortress 2 can apparently get high off the fumes from his Kritzkrieg medigun. It also heals him by +11 health!
• In Time Crisis 5, there is an unnamed drug that is stated to negate all sense of pain and fear from its user, but in reality turns them into what's basically a zombie. The Big Bad, Robert Baxter, wants to weaponize it in the form of bombs to detonate over entire cities.
• Ultima VII features Silver Serpent Venom, which temporarily ups all your stats only to permanently damage them when it wears off. Hilariously, using far too much of it at once will cause the damage to wrap backwards around the Cap into an absurd stat boost when it wears off, making them ridiculously strong with some very odd effects on game mechanics.
• We Happy Few has Joy, the bliss-inducing drug taken by the citizens of Wellington Wells to keep their spirits high and help them forget about the Very Bad Thing that happened during the war. Uncle Jack likes to assure the citizens that any rumors about Joy causing severe memory loss, paranoia, increased aggressiveness, and other complications are completely untrue.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Bloodthistle is an herb that can only be taken by Blood Elves. When taken, it can increase spell power for ten minutes. On the other hand, it has a twenty minute 'withdrawal', which lowers your spirit. Oh, and it's outlawed in Shattrath City.
  • In a lore interview, the blood specialization of Death Knights apparently have blood that works like this, blood that heals their allies (blood tap and bloodworms being the most apparent) but is addictive if overused, causing dependency and withdrawal in a way similar to the ghouls of Vampire: The Masquerade.
• X has spaceweed (think space marijuana) and space fuel (a.k.a. Argon whiskey). Both are illegal in the Commonwealth, and both are highly prized by players for pacifying the Space Pirate population.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1 has the red pollen orbs. Out of all the orbs that the Nopon manufacture there's the red variety. Like some real drugs, if they are processed correctly they can have some good potential uses, if not, they are very addictive and dangerous for health. There's a group of Nopon that sell this variety illegally to the citizens of Alcamoth, and a huge sidequest arc involves finding who and where they are and putting a stop to their business.
• Xenogears has "Drive", which in storyline doubles as super-addictive drug and Psycho Serum, developed by Solaris to turn its soldiers into crazed killers. As a gameplay item, though, it's just an incredibly expensive endgame stat booster that gives you the ability to turn the mascot character into an overpowered healtank.
• Yes, Your Grace: Oracle Dust has all the hallmarks of a drug: both medicinal and recreational uses, highly addictive, controversial legal status, bad withdrawals and people dying of overdose on a regular basis.

Visual Novels

• Narc plays an important role in Policenauts, which also gives a Shout-Out to the use of Liquid Sky in Snatcher. It is stated that the two places with the highest drug rates in the populated world are Beyond Coast and "America, where the War on Drugs is still being fought". Narc is described as having "the addictiveness of heroin and the hallucinogenic effects and potency of LSD" because it mixes organically grown black poppy opium with a synthetic hallucinogenic drug. (One character has the ability to not even respond physically to being shot due to the anesthetic effects of Narc, so it's presumably more opiate than hallucinogen.) When one Frozener (engineered humans with synthetic white blood) takes Narc, he is able to shrug off being shot 25 times like it's a minor inconvenience; he loses a lot of blood but manages to make a full recovery soon after.
• Liquid Sky in Snatcher, which was necessary since the game was made right in the middle of the 'War on Drugs' campaign.
• Thousand Dollar Soul has Angelfire, a powerful aphrodisiac made by microwaving and blowtorching a selection of things that include Twinkies, lemon juice, paint thinner, and battery acid.
• Togainu no Chi has Rein, which increases the user's strength and reflexes, but it also heightens their aggression and reduces their sanity.

Webcomics

• Ava's Demon: Odin sometimes de-stresses by smoking some kind of purple flower that he keeps stashed in a Book Safe. It's later revealed to help silence Pedri, a spirit that's vocally annoyed to be trapped in Odin's body.
• The wine made from the glowing berries in Between Two Worlds makes you relive an event from your past life, telepathically connect with a random living being or possibly just hallucinate very vividly. Not even the producers know.
• Blood is Mine:
  • Level calms you down, but it can outright kill you if you get too worked up physically.
  • Cleantex lets you remember absolutely everything in detail, but it can be hard to direct to specific memories. You also sometimes need to be reminded to breathe.
  • Save the Queen (or Queen for short) makes you lose time, do odd things, and wake up in random places. It actually contains knockoff alien blood and using it puts you under control of an evil Hive Mind.
• Copper eyes: Loveless™ is a drug provided by the government that suppresses one's ability to love, coming in pill form for teens and adults and a vitamin-rich syrup form for children. This doesn't seem to apply to sexual attraction, Darcy's friends flirting with other people, and Roman and Blaise acting in a sexual relationship.
• In Dreamkeepers, the intoxicating beverage of choice is "fermentae", which despite the name is actually the nectar of a parasitic plant that has had the spores boiled out of it. The results of drinking unboiled fermentae are not pretty.
• Erfworld shows that Hippiemancers can create these. They look like little pink flowers but are insanely addictive and eventually fatal. The Big Bad of Book 0 uses these to control her entire side. She names them hero buds, or heroine if the user is female.
• Homestuck:
  • The trolls, a race of aliens plagued by violent night terrors, sleep in cocoons filled with a powerful sedative gel called sopor slime, which has effects similar to marijuana when eaten. Gamzee Makara is a chronic user. For a good reason!
  • Jane later alchemizes two giant suckers, Caliborn's and Calliope's jujus, combines them into a single spiral sucker which hypnotizes her to lick it, and promptly engages Trickster Mode, which gives her a colorful appearance, a caucasian skin tone, a remarkable boost in power and a healthy dose of absolute uninhibited insanity. The effects are passed on to the other post-scratch kids via Groin Attack, a mystery pumpkin to the head, and a kiss. The hangover is a bitch, though.
• Kill Six Billion Demons:
  • Black Glass is a drug mined from the petrified veins of Throne's dead gods. Due to its origins, it is extremely addictive, horrifically sacrilegious, and very, very illegal (though Throne being the Wretched Hive that it is, trade of the stuff is still rampant).
  • Blue devil liquor, when drank, causes you to understand all languages... later, you will vomit up a tiny fetal devil, and if you eat it, the effect is made permanent. As a side effect, you'll also grow horns, though these fall off after a while.
• The Lydian Option has both Janta Leaf (a future "soft drug") and highly addictive blue alien fruit.
  • Fairies' dust is a hallucinogen, elves' venom is a hypnotic and anesthetic, and incubae's is a dissociative.
  • Unicorns' proximity causes euphoria and mental regression, but no chemical causing this effect has been identified so far.
• Marble Gate Dungeon: Opponi drops are apparently dropped into the eyes and leave long-term users with black bags under the eyes. Exactly what the drops do is unclear, but they are implied to be highly addictive and stereotyped as a "poor person drug". Ozzi is revealed to be a former Opponi user (he has the black bags, but hasn't been seen using drops on-page).
• Neon Ice Cream Headache is named after Neon Ice Cream, a drug that causes its user to be Trapped in TV Land.
• Overside has Black Spirit, which makes you immortal as long as you take it (also, terribly addicted and morally corrupt). In Vattu we also learn about the existence of Unweight, a blue (it's used as a pigment) substance that floats... and will also get you pretty high if consumed.
• Problem Sleuth has Candy Liquor, which is candy dumped into a still and brewed until properly alcoholic.^note This in fact can be done in real life, as any sugary item mixed with water can ferment into alcohol, but the results are often disgusting. It gets a user drunk out of their minds, but their Imagination skyrockets for a limited amount of time as a tradeoff and their imaginary self is near unstoppable while it's in effect. Candy Corn Whiskey (stronger than 'regular' corn whiskey) and even a sugar-free variant make prominent appearances. Candy itself, however, is perfectly safe to eat. MS Paint Adventures being what it is, the effects are likely the inspiration for the effects of the Trickster sucker in Homestuck.
• In Questionable Content, A.I.s have been shown emulating drunkenness by downcycling their processors (basically the reverse of overclocking), and using glitchy graphics drivers as hallucinogens. Also, Pintsize ends up acting pretty weird when he's given too much RAM, even for him. Marten has also complained about Pintsize coming home in the wee hours of the morning, rambling about quantum mechanics and reeking of WD-40.
• Runners has crush, which for some reason tends to explode violently in addition to turning entire villages of Ulon Dosi into Opium Dens.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • Captain Tagon reminisces about what happened to a unit given far too much room for their quarters something called "hyperjuana", which from the name is probably some kind of extra powerful marijuana equivalent. He also mentions "smack labs", presumably a combination of crack and meth, and good old-fashioned stills.
  • Also, Ovalquick, known to Schlock as "the tub of Happiness" and to others as "collateral damage to the conscience". While feeding it to several of Schlock's species, the ship doctor orders one of the grunts to not read the ingredient list... and there's an order to take their guns while they're at it.
    Ingredients: Glucose, fructose, corn syrup solids, concentrated cocoa-bean extract, assorted methylxanthine alkaloids (including caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline), sodium laureth sulfate, Minoxadyl, buckminster fullerene, codeine, hyper-ephedrine, nicotine, with BHA and BHT added to preserve freshness.
• Sluggy Freelance occasionally uses super-scientific drugs in the place of real ones. There was Riff's experiment with "Senti-Mental" and, of course, "Intravenous Drugs from Another Dimension!"
• In Ten Earth Shattering Blows, a special kind of bug, crushed and snorted, has an effect akin to cocaine.
• Unsounded: The magical drug "glut" is smoked for a temporary high and a steroid-like boost in muscle growth, with prolonged use causing distinctive gigantism.

Web Original

• Prifleden in Avalon's Reign is a completely legal drug injected through a needle (a "hypo") that fires off the pleasure center of the user's brain. Some people call it "orgasm in a needle", but others claim the high is much more intense than that. The company that produces it advertises the drug as non-addictive, but this does not appear to be true.
• Caelum Lex has Flush, a sort of amphetamine-like pick-me-up agents of the Society use, and ARC treatments for all the brainwashing the Society needs.
• In the GURPS adventure based on the Chaos Timeline, one dealer tries to sell the PCs the drug "black niig", which supposedly makes people feel "like Stalin,^note Not our Josef Stalin, but still a bad guy when he crushed his enemies' balls", and later they meet a crazy fundamentalist Christian who claims he knew a girl who never listened to advice, took nanodrugs and one day literally fell apart to dust.
• Looming Gaia has its own drugs. Most of them have relatively mundane places of origin and effects, but there's also a couple more fantastic ones, such as pyre crystals, which grow in pyriad corpses and that are made into dust that red elves can swallow to get high, and blue-eye shrooms, which cause a random magical effect on whoever eats them.
• Since the only law in the titular city of Mortasheen is "Chaos Reigns", then it should come as no surprise that a few of the game's Mons are made for producing these. Aside from the two plant-based ones, there's also the Crepusclent, which secretes psychotropic worms that induce ludicrously powerful Psychic Powers, but also causes very vivid hallucinations. There's also Jitter, who has tumorous drug-producing glands in its head that make it "a viable alternative to the coffee machine". Unfortunately, due to these glands, they're pretty much all insane.
• Mystery Flesh Pit National Park: The Pit's "amniotic thermal springs" produce a substance known as amniotic ballast that is, among other things, a very potent aphrodisiac in its most concentrated form. Doubles as a Fantastic Medicinal Bodily Product.
• The "Third Law" Spin-Off of the SCP Foundation features the story "Hypervelocity", in which a woman robs a bank while high on demons. It's exactly as insane as it sounds.
• The Tale of the Exile: The elves of The Physician's Guild use an extract from the Elisdee Lily as an antiseptic. Unfortunately for the main character, a side effect of Elisdee extract is wild hallucinations. It's implied that the elves actually sell the extract to patients once they become addicted to the hallucinations.
• The baby rattles in Twitter Story Earth 5 AR give off a noise that can cause a dopamine rush when shook, though too much can make them cranky when they stop.
• Subverted in the Mutants & Masterminds fan setting The World Less Magical/The World in the Aftermath, in which thionite (named after the drug in the Lensman books) is an expensive form of cocaine grown in soil treated with the setting's Green Rocks — a procedure that does not actually alter its effects in any way.

Web Videos

• The universe of Critical Role has a variety of these. Suude is a prominent example. Refined from magical substances such as residuum, the user has to succeed on a Constitution saving throw not to get knocked out. If they succeed, they get a sorcery point and a Metamagic Feat for a set period of time.
• The unnamed "cloudy drink" that is supplied to all the inhabitants of the eponymous Sex House when they refuse to have sex.
  Tara: Cloudy drink kills frog!
• Played for Horror in Smile Tapes with SMILE. It is made from an unknown fungus, is distributed through the black market and has utterly horrific effects on the human body.

Western Animation

• Arcane: Not only is Shimmer a powerful Psycho Serum, it's eventually refined into a party drug capable of being taken by patrons at a night club without the same Body Horror.
• Arthur: "To Eat or Not to Eat" features a newly released candy bar with all manner of Scary Science Words in its ingredient list, including "Tri-Enzomated Zorn Jelly", the effects of which bear a very close resemblance to hard drug addiction. When Buster and his mother confront the Corrupt Corporate Executive responsible for the candy, he effectively admits that it is meant to be addictive, and shortly thereafter there is a shot of a newspaper headline about him getting arrested.
• Batman Beyond:
  • In "The Winning Edge", Terry encounters a new recreational drug called "slappers", transdermal patches which grant super-strength and occasional fits of "roid rage". When Bruce identifies the main chemical as Venom, he immediately suspects that Bane is behind it, until Terry visits Bane, wherein we see what years of Venom use does to you. It isn't pretty. The real villain turns out to be Bane's orderly, who dies during his battle with Batman after he falls onto a box of slappers, overtaxing his heart.
  • In "Splicers", animal mutagens give rise to a drug-like culture — no adverse or overt addictive side-effects are shown, but the Splicers are portrayed as being deviant and intrinsically more confrontational.
  • In "Hooked Up", total-immersion virtual reality (basically computer-generated euphoric hallucinations) is portrayed as being potentially addictive. Spellbinder creates an even more potent version that is designed to be very addictive because it also stimulates the subject's emotional need for love and affection, with catastrophic side effects inevitably resulting from prolonged use.
  • In "Babel", Shriek creates "the fork"; a small, handheld device that can emit soundwaves that directly stimulate the brain's pleasure centers. Whilst this mechanically falls under Electric Instant Gratification, the effects are depicted as very much akin to a drug addiction — Shriek's assistant Ollie becomes a giggling, useless idiot whilst playing with the fork, and he's so hooked on it that he happily helps Shriek in his plans in exchange for being allowed to use it.
• The Batman: The Animated Series two-parter "Feat of Clay: Part 1/Part 2" has Renuyu, a face cream that makes the user's skin like putty and allows them to shape it in any way they desire but is extremely habit-forming. After actor Matt Hagen was disfigured in a car accident, Corrupt Corporate Executive Roland Daggett offered him Renuyu in place of plastic surgery and took advantage of his addiction to get him to commit crimes for him disguised as other people which eventually leads to him becoming Clayface.
• Bojack Horseman: In season 5, BoJack injures himself during a stunt and is prescribed what he calls "feelbetterin", described as a highly addictive opioid. Former Dr. Feelgood Dr. Hu asks him whether he's taking "oxyproxylcortisoid", which may or may not be a Bland-Name Product of the infamously abused opioid oxycodone. By the end of the season, BoJack ends up suffering from paranoid delusions, hallucinations, nightmares, and violent rages, all of which are more associated with stimulant abuse than opioid abuse.
• Spin, from the Bravestarr episode "The Price". It has a level of addictiveness bordering on Compressed Vice. Its effects are shown to be violent, with many users being taken to the hospital, and the kid who is the focus of the episode dying at the end.
• In Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Mira becomes addicted to phasing through radiation, because as we all know, radiation gives you superpowers! However, it also apparently gives you withdrawal, unkempt hair, and a really creepy voice. Justified by Bizarre Alien Biology.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers does this trope with an anti-drug episode, "Mind Pollution", in which the drug in question (oh-so-creatively called "Bliss") turns its victims into strung-out hollow-eyed zombies. Like the Bravestarr example above, Linka's cousin Boris dies. The episode even calls it a "new designer drug".
• Clone High: In "Raisin the Stakes: A Rock Opera in Three Acts", Johnny Hardcore (an expy of Jack Black played by Black himself) comes to the school to warn the students about the dangers of "doing raisins," referencing the "bananadine" urban legend which claimed that you could get high off of the white stuff inside a banana peel. Reverse psychology drives them all to try it, of course. This is exactly what the council of raisins wanted in order to sell more, although this example is an aversion because the buzz they give is nothing more than a placebo effect.
  Abe: Hm. I don't really feel anything... Well, I have a strong constitution, so I don't really I CAN TASTE THE SUN!
• The C.O.P.S. (1988) episode "The Case of the Lowest Crime" deals with Crystal Twist, a hexagon-shaped crystal that glows when absorbed through the skin. Criminal Berserko falls into a crate full of the stuff and goes into a coma.
• Double Dragon (1993) gives us RPM, a drug that turns its users into hulking blue monsters with super strength. The Shadow Master was able to make it out of a natural alien substance called Black Fungus.
• An episode of ABC's version of Doug has a tobacco analogue called Nic-Nacs, which can cause people's mouths to freeze up.
• Futurama:
  • Bender loves to smoke and drink, but that's okay since he's a robot. However, robots can become addicted to electricity, as Bender does in "Hell is Other Robots". It eventually causes him to be dragged to Robot Hell...
  • In "The Butterjunk Effect", Leela and Amy become addicted to a performance enhancer marketed as "Nectar", which comes from a species on Kif's planet. Near the end of the episode, they have to kick the stuff and go through severe withdrawal in doing so.
• The G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Very Special Episode "The Greatest Evil" featured a drug known as "Sparkle" which was sparkly red in color. The episode did go some way further than most of its type, however, in displaying relatively realistic effects of its use; one character was hospitalized with an overdose. At the end of the episode, the villainous drug-dealing Headman is unambiguously killed when he accidentally overdoses on his own drug, a rare moment for an episode of the type. Of course, the message of said 1980s episode is a little lost in the post-9/11 era, since the main plot suggests that drug dealers are a greater threat than heavily armed international terrorists, for whom Even Evil Has Standards, leading to the Enemy Mine situation of them teaming up with the good guys.
• In an episode of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, Birdman has a cancer scare due to years of his exposure to the sun as he is solar powered. However, lack of sunlight leads him to become sluggish and lose his powers...of attorney. He soon becomes addicted to tanning cream to make up for his lack of sunlight and he ends up selling all of his stuff to get more and end up getting a sort of intervention.
• Puffpods in Little Wizards are a fruit(?) that grows from trees and look vaguely like organic cigars. They have a shell-like growth at one end which is removed with a deft flick of the thumb, causing them to ignite and start smoldering (further enhancing the cigar appearance) before being smoked. Their effect includes intense euphoria, an inability to focus, short-term memory issues, and severe impulse control, rather reminiscent of marijuana. A pair of trolls blackmail the anxiety-riddled Boo into smuggling them a copy of a magical fertilizer spell by assuring him that the puffpods will cure his constantly frazzled nerves.
• Metalocalypse had "Totally Awesome Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake", a drug that would get you "so high your brain will blow chunks into the Milky Way." It has no effect on Pickles.
  Pickles: I grew up smokin' government weed every day, you know...
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony: Escape From Catrina features a Cat Folk witch named Catrina who is addicted to a powerful Psycho Serum called witchweed potion. She tries to capture the ponies as slave labor for gathering the ingredients so that she can make more. Interestingly, while Catrina does eventually kick the habit and make a Heel–Face Turn, this only happens at the last moment before she would have otherwise died by falling into a well. It's only because of her promise to kick the habit that the heroes save her life.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: It's implied in "Over a Barrel" that salt acts like alcohol for ponies.
    [A pony gets thrown out of a saloon called "The Salt Lick"]
    Saloonkeeper: That's enough salt for you!
    Salted pony: Can't I at least get a glass of water? [falls over]
• Ovide and the Gang: There's a certain flower that, when sniffed, would make anybody extremely happy and relaxed. As in, very mellow, laid-back, and agreeable. The villain of the show hated the flowers, as he didn't like getting along with others, but many episodes ended with him being forced to take a sniff. So in a nutshell, all the good guys on the show would sniff a flower to get high, and the villain didn't want to but was usually coerced into doing it. On a kid's show.
• Phantom 2040: Simulations of the natural environment from before the Resource Wars are portrayed like addictive drugs, complete with strung-out junkies going without food for a hit, and getting violent when their session is interrupted.
• Sealab 2021: Stimutacs, from the episode of the same name, are a fictional drug derived from the venom of the fugu invented by Sparks to make an assload of cash.
  Marco: I have the strength of a bear that has the strength of two bears!
• The Simpsons:
  • Swank, a drug marketed by the villain in a movie Bart and Homer watch in "Last Exit to Springfield"; it is ten times more addictive than marijuana.
  • Tomacco, a tomato/tobacco hybrid accidentally invented by Homer in "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)". It's very addictive and makes people aggressive. Eventually, a tobacco company executive tries to steal the last plant, which leads to his helicopter being brought down by a tomacco-addicted sheep. (The sheep survives.)
• The Smurfs (1981) episode "The Lure of the Orb" hides a story of the effects of drug addiction behind the use of a magic orb that's supposed to give enlightened inspiration to whoever uses it.
• South Park:
  • The episode "Major Boobage" has the town in a moral panic over "cheesing"—getting high off cat pee (where their hallucinations are a parody of Heavy Metal).^{And by parody we mean}A single parody of it, as in, everyone has the exact same hallucination and argues about what happens during it.
  • The Member Berries from the episode of the same name, which placate people by talking about nostalgic things, like "Member Chewbacca?" or "Member Ghostbusters?" But there is a side effect; after a while, they start saying things like "Member when there weren't so many Mexicans?" and "Member when marriage was just between a man and a woman?"
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man, the series pays homage to the storyline about Harry Osborn's drug addiction in the comics by using the Psycho Serum "Globulin Green". This has the fortunate side-effect of merging two of Harry's biggest storylines, his drug addiction and his eventual becoming of the Green Goblin. This is alluded to in the series, as he is originally thought to be the Green Goblin before it's revealed Norman's been manipulating Harry into taking the fall for him. Besides making the Harry story tighter it also makes the reveal of Norman Osborn being the Green Goblin a genuine shock for the first time in over forty years!
• Transformers: Prime: The synthetic Energon has this effect on Ratchet, making him increasingly unstable. This is a rare example of the drug being made by the affected party.
  Bulkhead: Stronger, faster, studlier.
• TRON: Uprising: In "Price of Power," the experimental weapon makes Beck faster and stronger, but also far more aggressive. The fact that this was allowed on a Disney XD show was probably because the situation was applied to computer programs as opposed to humans.
• Young Justice (2010): "Shields" are patches which suppress Superboy's stabilizing human DNA, giving him access to a full range of Kryptonian powers, but also making him more aggressive and less rational, effectively functioning as steroids. His growing addiction was actually portrayed semi-realistically, for instance, using them in fights which he could probably handle without the power boost, becoming twitchy if going for long periods without them and often unconsciously scratching the spot on his arm where he usually put them.

Real Life

• The Secret of Monkey Island's grog recipe was picked up by an Argentinian news show and promoted as a real thing teenagers drink.
• On surveys about school environments, students will sometimes be asked how many times in the past thirty days they've taken Panda B; there is no such drug, and if someone says they've taken it, their survey answers can be disregarded because they're obviously lying.
• The "Blue Star tattoo" is a longtime urban legend present in several countries around the world, which claims that drug dealers sell kids homemade tattoos depicting blue stars (hence the name) or popular cartoon characters with LSD laced in the ink, so that when the kids lick the sheets to moisten them before applying them to their skin, they get high. However, there's no evidence that this was ever used to distribute LSD to kids, and the fact that LSD is not addictive means that there'd be no reason for a drug dealer to use such a method.
• "Bananadine" is an urban legend that claims that people can create LSD or other hallucinogens using the white stuff inside banana peels. The legend came from a New York Times article that came up with the idea as a thought experiment about the prosecution of illegal drugs in America (given that many illegal drugs, such as cocaine, heroin, and, at one point, alcohol, were previously legal and commonplace), but ended up getting spread by William Powell, who mistook the article for fact. The urban legend became so big that it eventually got parodied by the likes of Frank Zappa and Clone High, among others.
• An odd variation with adrenochrome. While it is a real chemical compound, created when adrenaline comes into contact with oxygen, a conspiracy theory arose in the late 2010s falsely claiming that it was an incredibly powerful hallucinogen procured by extracting children's adrenal glands.^note While adrenochrome is very mildly hallucinogenic, ingesting it causes mild depressed feelings, making it undesirable as a recreational drug. It's also childishly simple to synthesize, anyway: most of what you would need can be found in an epi pen. The urban legend is most likely based on the portrayal in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

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