Fiction’s New Fake Drugs: A Preliminary Pharmacopoeia

And then there are the fictional drugs that are actually marketed by the pharmaceutical companies. Along with pick-up trucks, they sponsor 85% of broadcast television, which has become a reality unto itself. Some of the ads are so effective that they don't even mention the "disease" that the drug is meant to treat. If this commercial appeals to you, ask your doctor if Ibelieveitall may be right for you.

This piece is chock-full of spoilers. To notify us: "spoiler alert!" after having already dished out several high-stakes spoilers without warning is frankly a little rich. The author ought to be ashamed.

I am almost to the end of Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” and I might not have hung in there had it not been for the psychiatrist's character. As you say, she is "one of the very worst psychiatrists in the history of fiction" but also one of the funniest. Dr. Tuttle has the ricocheting twists and turns of a Dickens character. She is delicious, and I laugh out loud at her. I thought of Orwell's Soma while reading this article, but of course it doesn't fit into the initial discussion of organic and Nature derived psychotropics. In 1959 a drug called Soma (carisoprodol) was developed as an antiseptic and eventually marketed as a muscle relaxant. I would love to know if the developers had read 'Brave New World' when they named their drug. How do they come up with their wacky trade trade names anyway? Pilfering great works of fiction is as good a way as any. If the real world Soma had proliferated like a Prozac, that would have been an irony worth a pause.

The mysterious Oneirine from Gravity's Rainbow, by Pynchon, has always haunted me.... "Oneirine hauntings show a definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader's Digest article" "Oneirine and Methoneirine. Variations reported by Laszlo Jamf in the ACS Journal"

An inventory of fictional drugs that doesn't cite William Gibson or Cory Doctorow? You could index Gibson's novels as an alternative history of control drugs (and drug control) in America since the death of the sixties. I'm not so much critical as puzzled by this omission.

Pretty great article. I also want to throw in a mention of "Vurt" by Jeff Noon. It's also entirely about a strange feather type of drug.

There are surely many early pseudopharmacopeiae missing from this amusing brief, but I must correct the particular omission of "benignimizers", "recriminol", "mascons", "up'n'at'm," etc, from Stanislaw Lem's 1971 Futurological Congress, a book constructed of a series of encounters with psychoactive drugs become tools of the state clothing collective societal disorders and delusions. The work deserves some mention if only for the shear number of different drugs it deploys. While it hearkens back to a time when we thought that drugs might not only be delusive, but truly revelatory, Lem was always wiser than Leary, and his skepticism remains a bracing tonic today.

Wikipedia has a great article on fictional books, but not apparently not one on fictional drugs. It should. This article could serve as its basis.

I would recommend Daryl Gregory's "Afterparty". In it he describes a drug that lets you see your own personified god whether that be an angel or Ganesh. Even though on one level you might know it isn't real it still seems real to you, and of course some people can't distinguish the two at all.

Truth stranger than fiction, if I may. Broke my kneecap a few years ago. I have a high pain tolerance, so pain wasn't bad. A nurse urged me to take an opioid named Norco (cue laughter track). I took one. A few hours later, I kept falling asleep in the middle of phone conversations. The following early morning I hallucinated walking to the bathroom - in a completely different hospital. Later that day, I told the nurse what had happened. "Oh," she said, 'you're opioid naive - you haven't taken them" I intend to remain opioid naive for the rest of my life.

Inventing a fictional drug and trip is as startling a process as inventing a character: it takes on a life of its own. I count myself as an obscure member of this club. For a self-published thriller called BRAINS & BRAWN I dreamed up "hex": "MDMA temporarily lowers interpersonal boundaries," said the Harvard doctor. "Hex dissolves them." "The potential for abuse, for mind control, is terrifying," said the Berkeley psychopharmacology professor. Outside, packs of painfully thin kids in hex-sign T-shirts-the "hexies"-quiver and murmur and make their telepathic suicide pacts. Someone is trying to destroy a generation." The plot that led up to it may have been convoluted, but some readers thought the drug trip itself must be real.

Fun article! I have add a couple from a short story by the late Edward Bryant: Entropine, and Catastrophinol

The artwork on this piece is phenomenal

Sorry to be flippant but I think we are now having a "dopioid" epidemic... This a the drug that makes you think electing a Donald is a good idea... The street name would be "cool aid" as in, "He's drunk the cool aid."

Lethem's oafish omission of Mark von Schlegell's 2006 novel Venusia makes this SF junkie wanna reach for the Pantagreulion...

"Bilduoo": drug, IKEA chair, or sex position?

the nightmare passages from Patrick Melrose's terrifying addiction to Booze and heroin-real addiction, true horror.

Don't forget SOMA, from Brave New World, which is starting to seem like a pretty good idea these days.

What a pharmacopia of delirium! (And yes, I just made that word up.) But, you missed my favorite, the soy sauce from "And John Dies at The End" by David Wong. Sarcasm, mixed with cynicism, in a unsubtle base of satire that bakes your way into the brain. Enjoy!

I just read one of my favorite lines in the Times, "Please, sir, can I have some less"