The Updates

Drugs

Drugs in Horizon exist in three broad categories: Normal drugs are common, addictive, and there may be long-term consequences of heavy use, but it is viable to go cold turkey (though there may be long-lasting effects once you are clean). The Cartel will gladly sell them to you, but you could look to the Dockyard Rats or various independent operators to get your fix. Exotic drugs are much more rare, and provide effects which are much more intense than Normal drugs. They are, however, more expensive, and only the Cartel has the wide range of contacts needed to provide a regular supply. Crap drugs are filthy, not much fun, and wreck your health; the only good thing you can say about them is that they are cheap and easily-obtained.

Normal

Charim Blue
There's a blue flower which grows in many gardens in Charim. The dried petals, when smoked (or baked into brownies), produce a calming and soothing effect. Charim Blue is illegal mainly due to the creeping apathy it promotes; heavy users simply allow their lives to fall into squalor and ruin, because they are entirely content to just smoke and watch things go to seed.

Horsegrass ("herb", "chew")
Horsegrass is a thick, green, fleshy variant of everyday grass which grows in isolated spots of Vegdarbarra and Lasinia. When chewed, it delivers an overwhelming feeling of apathy and escape. The user stops caring about anything at all. It's frequently used by people who need to relax after a long, stressful day. Once you're hooked on it, though, it's remarkably difficult to care about anything else at all. Serious junkies could end up starving to death with food all around them and not caring.

Maidensbud ("rosebud", "bud", "liquid love")
The maidensbud flower has long been associated with chastity and virginity, thanks mostly to the suggestive shape of its seed pods. This is deeply ironic, because the most common use for it these days is to cheat people out of their virginity. When swallowed, the seed pods promote a wild feeling of euphoria and oneness for about an hour that's extremely difficult to tell apart from being in love unless you've tried maidensbud before. There are countless plays where a wicked stepmother tricks the heroine into an arranged marriage by sprinkling her food with maidensbud, and there are countless horror-stories of kidnappers using maidensbud to lure their target away willingly.

Battle Alpha
Certain primates (thought to have orginiated from beyond the Wall) have an organ in their necks known as Versinya's Gland that fills them with adrenalin when they need to fight. A few are now kept in captivity by the unscrupulous to be bred, because when properly refined it becomes a potent, potent combat drug. It's sold illegally under a variety of names in various armed forces and mercenary outfits and it's more than common to see aging ex-soldiers on the streets begging for another shot of Alpha.

Exotic

The sensation provided by Vegdar-dust is often described as a sense of detachment and distance. Users often feel that they are watching themselves going about their business from a distance; they claim that the drug allows them to get a sense of objectivity that can't usually be obtained.

Desert Wine
Prized by the nomads of Jurica, Desert Wine is a mixture of saps from various cacti found in the Jurican desert. It tastes excellent, and a glass or two is enough for a great evening - you'll not need to sleep, and you'll feel euphoric and somewhat giggly throughout the night. Binge-drinkers end up lying on the floor tittering at the joke the curtains are telling them. The hallucinations provoked by heavy Desert Wine use are vivid and tend to be jolly affairs, bad trips being almost unheard of; the main problem is the inevitable depression that the wine-drinker will enter on coming down from the high. Desert Wine is especially popular amongst the aristocracy, who often have a few bottles of a fine vintage secreted in their wine cellars along with the more conventional drinks.

Crawjuice
The crawfish has developed an interesting natural defence against being eaten: it creates a highly halluciogenic pheremone and stores this in a bladder until it needs it. When threatened, the would-be predator gets a face full of the stuff, giving the crawfish time to escape. Ironically, this has led to the crawfish being hunted nearly to extinction by dealers. The high from crawjuice has you seeing stark, vivid geometrical patterns everywhere. It's very out-there, very abstact, and very chic.

Crap

Bad Vegdar-dust is harvested by many communities in Vegdarbarra by shooting the birds which eat the seed pods of the Vegdar lichen, and cutting the pods out of their stomachs. The pods are thus partially-digested, and mixed in with all the other things that those Wall-nesting birds tend to eat (and they aren't especially clean creatures); in order to get any effect at all the dust must be injected, if orally ingested it will just make you sick.

A bad Vegdar-dust trip is, as might be expected, broadly similar to a good Vegdar-dust trip, but the detachment is not as pleasant. Users report feeling trapped outside their body, helpless observers to the destruction of their own life. They persist, however, partially because bad Vegdar-dust is more addictive than Everquest and partially because the sense of helpless detachment is not as bad as directly experiencing the life of a dust-freak. They also tend to forget such things as hygiene and eating - heavy use of bad Vegdar-dust eventually leads to the user regarding his or her body as a mere shell, useless flesh serving no good purpose. There's a high rate of disease amongst users of bad Vegdar-dust, as can be expected if you inject raw bird innards into your veins; users often become pallid and anemic as the filth contaminates their blood. What bad Vegdar junkies really fear is the Brickbat Syndrome. Rumour has it that this is a result of ingesting bad Vegdar-dust that's been mixed with chunks of brick from the Wall, though there's no real proof of this. The Syndrome first leads to insomnia, then an acute intolerance of bright light (so that sufferers can only see during the night), then the persistent delusion that one can fly, then blindness, then death.

Cockroaches
The Horizon River Cockroach is easily identified by the irregular red blotches that cover its carapace, as if the cockroaches had somehow contracted a nasty skin disease, or perhaps been in a bad fire. The cockroaches have bred and made their nests in the sewers of Horizon for centuries, and for centuries cockroach-dealers have made forays into the sewers to collect the pregnant cockroaches.

When the cockroaches are pregnant, they grow fat and slow, and are easily caught. Their egg-sacs are full of a clear fluid, which is easily extracted (killing the roach in the process). Desperate junkies buy the extract and inject it, giving them a brief high reminiscent of bad opium.

Here's where things get a bit Naked Lunch. The act of injecting the fluid fills the user's bloodstream with a great number of cockroach eggs. The eggs hatch, and initially the cockroach maggots live in the bloodstream - if you cut a cockroach junkie, you can even see the larger maggots swimming about in his bloodstream. Once they are old enough to survive in the junkie's stomach acid, the maggots eat through the stomach lining and pupate in the bellies of the addicts, hanging from the stomach wall in tiny chrysali. The stomach of the addict is liable to swell greatly during this time to give the pupae room.

Eventually, the pupae hatch and a new generation of hip young cockroaches is born. Addicts eagerly await the day that their stomach stops swelling; it means that the harvest is about to begin. The beetles leave the body in the addict's feces; cockroach addicts can get one free hit of cockroaches every other turn by collecting cockroaches from their own poo and selling the baby cockroaches back to their dealer, who will rear them and sell the females back to the addicts once they have grown up and been impregnated.

Roach addicts are universally reviled, and cockroach dealers aren't seen as being much better. The Cartel won't even consider getting into the roach business, and the Dockyard Rats tend to lose their temper when you accuse them of roach-dealing; it tends to be the purview of independent operators, although some Beggars have known to sell people cockroaches in return for information.

Aside from the terrible diseases you'd expect to get from injecting yourself with cockroach extract, the nastiest consequence of cockroach addiction is the possibility of overdose. Dying because your stomach has burst (due to being full of beetles), or because your bloodstream has become clogged up with maggots is a pitiful way to go.