In the world of play-by-post creative writing, people's knowledge of how drugs work start at Looney Tunes and end somewhere between Fear & Loathing and the Zydrate song in Repo. It's a weird thing to bitch about, but hear me out if you've got the time (Which you do if you've consecutively clicked to the last page of a topic on the non-roleplaying section of a roleplaying hobbyist site, just reminding you, you fucking procrastinator)
First off, I get that I am not pandering to the right crowd, and that the true issue here is that I'm talking about different worlds. The guy in a red and black mime shirt and skinny jeans at a club playing Audioslave inhabits a different world than the teenage girl with a dyed blue men's haircut on an online roleplaying forum, and the two have vastly different knowledge of different things. The guy can probably tell me more about the effects of Xanax, the girl can tell me more about Castiel from Supernatural, and they're both fine people to be. There's nothing wrong with either, don't get me wrong, but shit gets a little silly when the two worlds try to interact, so let me lay down the law for those of you who care enough to have read this far. By definition, a drug is a substance with a physiological or psychological effect when introduced to the body. People don't fuck up their fictional drugs at the definition level, just immediately after, and I argue that as creative writers, we should strive to make written depictions more accurate than their loosest definition.
There are four classifications of drugs -- Stimulants, Opiates, Depressants, and Hallucinogens. Some people argue more, but really, these classifications exist to separate drugs based on the legal system. Huffing paint isn't very different at a chemical level than getting rip-roaring drunk or taking some downers, but if you're arrested for huffing paint, you're probably so fucked up that some time in the criminal justice system might do you some good, as opposed to the less socially deviant alcoholic and pill popper, respectively. Everybody knows what these classifications mean, or at least, they kind of do, because the names are pretty straightforward. Stimulants make you wired, depressants make you slow, opiates make you numb, and hallucinogens make you hallucinate. Not too hard to follow so far, right?
Well, that's where everybody's knowledge of how drugs work fishtails into absolute fucking madness. A drug cannot be in more than one classification, full stop. Not a crazy rule to remember. Mixing them at the same time is a great way to waste one of your drugs. This is why people take stimulants when they are coming down from depressants. It is why candy flipping requires an interval of a few hours between different types of drugs. It is why the high from sherm is indescribably different from a cannabis high, and so on. You can google these later, you out of the loop nerd.
What I'm getting at is, nobody knows that, and this ignorance is typically easy to spot in the first few paragraphs of a piece of writing. This comes in two flavors. The first is the fictional supersoldier drug. It is described up and down as a stimulant, pointing out increased attentiveness, speed, and strength, typically until the last few lines where the writer realizes that it sounds a little OP, so they add a tidbit about uncontrollable rage, hallucinations, and maybe something about a heart attack. The second flavor of fictional drugs I see are the "I'm a street rat" drug, typically described as a mix of a fun-to-write hallucinogen, mixed with the disassociated junkie aesthetic of opiate addicts, like in that movie Trainspots! 420 haha! It's probably a fun color, is injected intravenously, and glows a little. Both are Drugtype + Hallucinogen, and the reason this is so dumb is that people on hallucinogens are really different than people on uppers or downers. If a substance makes you hallucinate, you're going to feel and act like you're at a Grateful Dead concert, not a supersoldier or out-of-it junkie.
You might be saying to yourself, "But these are all fictional drugs, Deadbeatwalking! What happened to creative freedom? What happened to the suspension of disbelief?" Yeah? What happened to homework? What happened to getting it right? What happened to using elements of a story accurately to tell a better story? Would a person who knows about firearms not eyeroll a little at a character firing one underwater, as opposed to a writer having a character's gun get jammed for that very reason? Would an equestrian not appreciate a story that describes the realistic obstacles of a horseback escape as opposed to a character who succeeds by virtue of just having a very fast horse? Would an American history enthusiast prefer depictions of poor hygiene and racism, or Little House on The Prairie?
I don't know how to finish this rant, I guess because by the time you finish a rant, you realize how pointless a rant is.
Don't do the world of creative writing a disservice with hacky writing. And don't do drugs while I'm at it.
srsly don't do drugs kids
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