March 31st, 2008
7. U4EA, Beverly Hills 90210
The second season of Beverly Hills 90210 found Brandon Walsh (Jason Priestley) engaged in a tumultuous relationship with beautiful/troubled/wildly coiffed newcomer Emily Valentine (Christine Elise). Drawn to her rebellious streak, Brandon accompanies Emily to an underground dance club (cool!) where she doses his drink with a drug called U4EA. (Not cool!) A clear analog for Ecstasy, U4EA makes Brandon feel good for a while. (Cool!) Unfortunately he feels too good to drive, and he returns the next day to find his car stripped for parts, prompting him to end his relationship. Not cool. Remember: Fictional drugs make you lose your car and force you to break up with your awesome, druggie girlfriend.
8. Mutant Growth Hormone, various Marvel comics
If you're a mutant in the Marvel Comics universe, normal folks tend to hate you. Or they want to be you. Or both. Popularized in Brian Michael Bendis' retired-superhero-turns-bitter-P.I. book Alias and his run on Daredevil, MGH has plagued Marvel's mean streets in recent years, giving users a temporary, and unpredictable, blast of mutant powers. Usually nothing good comes of it, making the normal people hate mutants even more, while MGH addicts head off to chase another dangerous high.
9. Promicin, The 4400
In similar fashion, the later seasons of The 4400 largely center around a substance called promicin, a dose of which either gives users a random superpower, or instantly kills them. After 4400 people disappeared from around the world and reappeared in Seattle with various supernatural abilities, crazy scientist Jeffrey Combs found the previously unknown substance in their blood; he isolated it and created a glowing yellow injectable form, which he started taking obsessively, gradually gaining his own minor superpowers as a result. (All of which was a clear homage to the 1985 cult-hit H.P. Lovecraft adaptation Re-Animator, in which a character played by Combs created a similarly glowing yellow goop he called "the reagent," which turned corpses into shambling zombies, though Combs also frequently shot it up himself, it in place of coffee and No-Doz.) As The 4400 progressed and the abductees were increasingly treated as second-class citizens and threats to national security, some of the "4400s" began distributing injectable promicin freely on the street, so people could gain their own superpowers and join the 4400 movement. (Or die, and no longer be the 4400s' problem.) Oddly, the government's subsequent War On Promicin wasn't much more effective than its current War On Drugs.
10. Melange, Dune
Originally intended as a metaphor for fossil fuels, the drug melange—better known as "the spice"—is one of the building blocks of Frank Herbert's Dune books. The self-titled debut of the series introduces the strange genesis and effects of melange: Formed in a complex process out of excretions from the giant sandworms of the desert planet Arrakis—the only planet in the known universe where it can be made—spice has become humankind's most precious natural resource. Without its psychotropic, ESP-granting powers (not to mention the side effect of all-blue eyes and even total mutation), interplanetary travel is impossible. On a more immediate level, it's the main cultural currency of the desert-dwelling Fremen of Arrakis, and the substance that becomes pivotal in their search for a new messiah.
11. Substance D, A Scanner Darkly
In Richard Linklater's spiritually faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly, the very near future is a world much like our own—only America is out of its freakin' gourd on Substance D, a new drug distilled from a little blue flower that amps up hallucination and paranoia into an almost transcendental freakiness. The film and book both dive deep into the fevered minds of addicts, but it focuses just as much on the social, cultural, and even economic forces behind drug epidemics, and the wars fought against them. In one particularly enlightening interview from 1977, Dick recounted some of the real-life, post-hippie paranoia that was funneled into A Scanner Darkly:
12. Glint, Strangers With Candy
In the first episode of Strangers With Candy, Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) struggles to fit in as a 46-year-old freshman at Flatpoint High. To butter up the popular girls, she draws on her years as a junkie runaway and mixes up a batch of glint ("also known as glow, glimmer, or Satan's harelip") from nasty-looking household chemicals. Jerri's classmate Poppy rubs the sparkly green goop on her lips and experiences numbness, hallucinations, and superhuman energy. Believing she's a bee, Poppy kills herself trying to fly through a keyhole. Jerri takes advantage of the school's grieving to hold a "memorial party," at which glint-crazed guests kill her pet turtle, Shelly.
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