Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create circumstances in which "rule by/through drugs" is the modus operandi of at least one government. I don't mean something like Mexico where you have a bunch of powerful drug cartels, nor do I mean that the government is essentially one giant drug cartel -although they certainly can be that as well if you want - but rather a situation where a country uses drugs on its population to keep them under control.

If you can somehow not make this horribly dystopian then you win all the bonus points.
 
How about China, instead of banning the opium trade, views it as a tool to keep dissidents placid and contented?
Now that's the recipe for a DARK TL, especially if the British or French start taking cues to apply to their colonies... Or the South decides it wants opium to keep their slaves docile...
 
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create circumstances in which "rule by/through drugs" is the modus operandi of at least one government. I don't mean something like Mexico where you have a bunch of powerful drug cartels, nor do I mean that the government is essentially one giant drug cartel -although they certainly can be that as well if you want - but rather a situation where a country uses drugs on its population to keep them under control.

If you can somehow not make this horribly dystopian then you win all the bonus points.
The Hashashins?They did rule a state and although the population as a whole doesn't seem to use drugs a lot,they did use drugs to indoctrinate people.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
It depends on the drug that is used. You can do many 'interesting' things with mood-altering substances....

There's a vague plan I have to include a very radical totalitarian regime in a certain scenario. Among other nasty things, I'm planning for its government to have a monopoly on drug production. The regime then uses 'rations' of stimulative and addictive drugs to keep its soldiers dependent and stimulated. All soldiers are compelled to take the drugs, and this keeps them loyal-- because desertion means horrible withdrawal symptomes. The dosage is upped for certain frontline units, turning them into berserkers. Finding this works well enough, this regime then starts to expand this method to other parts of the population-- using other sorts of drugs as well, such as more 'calming' ones, to keep people docile. Since this government doesn't really care about the long-term health effects of this practice, it will ultimately force its people to take 'uppers' or 'downers' depending on the kind of activity that has to be carried out by the person in question. Needless to say, this cannot end well.

I think that my vague plan is pretty much what you have in mind, although this aspect of the regime is hardly the worst part of it. In any case, I can't really imagine a way to make this kind of thing not horrible, to be honest.
 
The Hashashins?They did rule a state and although the population as a whole doesn't seem to use drugs a lot,they did use drugs to indoctrinate people.

That may not be true. It is simply a saying that may or may not be true. You do not need intoxicants to create a highly militant religious group devoted to millennialism and radical resistance.
 
What about Coca Cola actually being made of cocaine? I could see something like the banana republic wars where at the first years of the XXth century Coke and PepsiCo each align themselves with a US political party and use their influence to send US Marines to prop up puppet regimes in foreign countries, just to secure their supply of cheap base materials. After all, no politician could get away with depriving hard working Americans of their end-of-day coke...
 
According to some people, this is OTL with chemtrails and whatever they put in the water, so better buy only certain brands of bottled water and make sure you buy orgone generators to get rid of chemtrails over your house.

More seriously (and this is pretty over the top), get Big Tobacco/predecessors of Big Tobacco an even greater say in the government and culture of the West in the early 20th century. Get a totalitarian United States which happens to give the tobacco industry a major say in how things are ran. Get them to promote the idea that smoking is as natural and necessary as drinking water and eating food. We have to remember that cigarettes were popular enough that the military demanded every soldier get some cigarettes, since they were necessary for fighting a war. So using that logic, cigarettes could be made "necessary" for everyday life. Even little kids need cigarettes to get through the schoolday! Science can be tampered with to support this. Totalitarian United States goes with this logic, and makes damn sure everyone gets their cancer sticks. Of course, you still have to pay for them, although for the poor, elderly, etc., the government will cover the price, and soup kitchens and such hand them out with every meal. Further, anyone who doesn't smoke is viewed as abherrant, odd, and anti-patriotic, amidst other insults. The very act of not smoking puts you on a watchlist in the same way being a communist in the 1950s did.

If/when a rebellion breaks out, the government makes sure no tobacco gets through to the rebellious area. Strikes and other conflicts are often broken in this manner. Prisoners sentenced to solitary confinement, or other dangerous prisoners, are denied cigarettes (which prisoners are normally given). The government thus uses nicotine addiction to control the population. And as tobacco companies are closely associated with the government, anything linking cigarettes to lung cancer, heart disease, etc. are considered anti-American propaganda and pseudoscience, and are not allowed to be published or spread. Any American scientist or researcher working on that line of science will disappear in the night, and those who flee abroad will be certain they are persona non-grata. The government will fund plenty of efforts globally to make damn sure that they can discredit and destroy anyone, anywhere in the world, who thinks that smoking is dangerous. And in general, the government doesn't particularly care if some people get that from smoking anyway, since after all, not everyone does, right?
 
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