PLEASE NOTE: The makers of BrightFutureMUSH do not endorse the use of mind-altering substances, and the following passages should not in any way be read to suggest that they do. ALSO, we are not suggesting that very many of the characters on the MUSH will use these substances. We do not expect any higher rate of substance use/abuse than that among characters in any other MUSH or world. These facts are given as a piece of scene-setting, another puzzle-piece in the picture of how the world functions, overall. There has never been a society in which addictive or psycho-active drugs did not play some part; this section of the material is a recognition of that fact, and nothing more.
While nothing is strictly impossible to get with Mages around, drugs which require a lot of processing and transportation are pretty hard to find in the Bright Future. Marijuana and alcohol are runaway favorites, since they are easy to produce on an individual level. Tobacco, however, is almost as hard to find as cocaine. Opium is usually taken straight, rather than processed into heroin (although the opiates requiring lower-tech processing, like morphine and laudanum, have made something of an urban comeback), valerian is more common than Valium, and LSD has been replaced as a preferred hallucinogen by nutmeg, morning-glory, and Jimson weed - resulting in a rise in hallucinogen-related fatalities - along with the ever-popular mushrooms. Peyote use is somewhat more widespread, simply because the areas in which it can be grown have increased under the angry sun, but it's still a taste relatively few people manage to acquire, and mostly used in its religious aspects. PCP, X, Speed, and all the other laboratory-dependent chemicals have suffered from the drastic reduction in laboratories and are no longer common.
Even caffeine is a scarcer commodity than it once was, although the climate is on the side of coffee and cocoa growers and any well-established plantation makes enormous profits. Of all the drug classes, it is the powerful stimulants/euphorics which have proved hardest to perpetuate, and there is a clamoring market for any possibilities.