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Grab yourself a seat, start a fire and poke one of our resident vigilantes, average Joes or supervillains as much as you'd like.

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IamLEAM1983
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To Benson

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

What are the drug use stats for Hope, overall?
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IamLEAM1983
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Post by IamLEAM1983 »

"While I was on the beat, I locked up the occasional mundane junkie. The East Coast's always had a yen for Crystal Meth, and Hope's no different. It's no Chicago or Montreal, but we still have meth-heads strolling up and down Sandhill and Renton's cheaper tenements. You'll find two or three Heisenbergs trying to sublimate via or vampire blood into their glass, so Hope's like a lotta Nexus cities in the sense that our confiscated meth looks like a real nice Raver kit. All the colors of the rainbow... Heh.

Otherwise, eh. The late 2010s' Opioids craze got to us same as it did the rest of the East Coast, and Fentanyl's derivatives are still popular for folks looking for more than your average bong rip. MDMA only ever pops up during Eirean McHale's sponsored Midsummer Festival - we get a lot of tribal, Trance and Electronica producers in Centennial Park for two weeks - and pot's the ever-present, low-key factor we're never too sure as to whether we should just ignore it or at least enforce token rules to appease the modern-day Prohibitionists. Option 2 usually wins. A couple grams per person gets you a very knowing - and secretly understanding - warning from my colleagues; while possession and distribution gets you the absolute bare-bones sentencing the State's laws allow for, plus a hefty fine and bail threshold.

As to why the fine and bail post limit? That's 'cause we've got our own State-sanctioned pot-growers in Old Hope. Get yourself checked out, have a doctor agree that you need something that's more holistic than your usual painkillers, and you'll get a judgment-free access to the city's smattering of cigar vendors. Cigar vendors who also cover Hope and part of Providence's needs in terms of pipes and bongs. You don't get a say as to what you actually do smoke; but at least it's not one of those 'blaze for three days straight and then start popping minor cancers 'cause your body starts rejecting the via add-ons or the nanobots your shady-ass dealer snuck into the stuff' types of blends.

Then, of course, there's the supernatural stuff. The most obvious one is anything that's based on vamp blood. Most of the producers aren't hugely imaginative, so all you need to do to spot sellers is trawl Craigslist under an assumed name and look for stuff like Pure Stoker, Shreck Shit or Le Fanu Special Edition. It's usually the work of broke baby vamps trying to strike it rich by selling their blood mixed in with something else. MDMA, again, or sometimes Ecstasy. The harshest buzz comes from sugar pills just drenched in the stuff - three fifty-milligram doses comes pretty close to replicating the effects of Enthrallment, without the modern consentment-based legal waivers in effect. It's no big surprise, but the Vienna Council moves in hard on anyone who's suspected of distributing anything blood-based. The only exception are ER-grade hematological compounds designed to prolong a patient's life or to ensure they'll survive a risky operation. Obviously, they're the product of tightly-controlled pharmacorp deals and barred behind miles of red tape. No pun intended.

Past that, there's Jabberwocky gas packets sold with modded Ventolin or Flovent cortico-steroid inhalers, and a bunch of fairly carefree Sidhe who sell sensory Oaths. A lot of these artists say the purchasers are buying their way to synaesthesia - literal sensory overlaps, more or less - and they never design their "product" to last more than a few hours. Again, they're more in the Ren Faire or Transhuman crowds, so they typically only really crop up around Summer's peak. They're largely harmless, though - even if we've had a few deaths caused by pedestrians being too distracted by the sensory overload to realize they were about to get run over by a car...

If you've got Paradise money, you can always check around Renton or around the bridge leading to Mertown; there's a lotta expats from Gliese that are ready and willing to sell all kinds of nanobot-based payloads, from the full-size Bonzi Buddy-esque monstrosity that takes up residence in your visual cortex for a few weeks, to full-length video game experiences that hijack the entire sensory apparatus. You've also got Wrench Jockeys - or guys that specialize in giving Clanks jollies. Illegal mods and unsanctioned tune-ups - even the Victorian androids get a shot at kissing the proverbial Green Fairy.

There's a lot of options, but the overall statistics are telling: we more or less live on a seesaw, with stable decades seeing usage statistics plummet and more portentous times like we have nowadays resulting in spikes."  
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