QUOTE (Ancient History @ Aug 27 2008, 10:24 PM)

We deliberately left it vague except in a couple cases. In real life, drug addictions are usually a mixture of physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms with personality and psychosomatic symptoms. So you have the people who started out doing a drug because they liked the feeling when high and now they just feel like crap all the time and do the drug to feel normal, and you have the people that don't physically need the drug but have such weak personalities that they can't stand life without it, and the whole spectrum of want/need in between.
Note, however, that there are drugs that are simply chemically unable to physically addict you.
Not that this makes them that much less risky, as mental addiction has disadvantages that can be just as severe as the hellish withdrawal symptoms some physical addictions cause.
Also, as noted before, most people will already be mentally habituated by the time they get hooked physically, or will soon acquire a mental addiction when indulging on a daily basis.
Getting over the physical part of a heroin addiction is already hard enough, but it's the mental addiction that's responsible for most junkies relapsing after several months or years off the smack.
BTW, now that we already have a recent drug thread here, there's something i've been wondering about for some time now.
When taking a look at the tables in Arsenal, i noticed that deepweed has an F availability.
No surprise, some might say, it's an illegal drug, what did you expect?
Well, the problem is, most drugs in SR aren't completely forbidden.
In fact, the only other drugs that are completely and flat-out illegal are laés and K-10 (and warp, if you count it as a recreational drug and not a combat gas).
What exactly makes an awakened seaweed so dangerous that it is clamped down upon harder than paranormal heroin, cocaine cut with short-term memory erasers and combat drugs that can easily kill a man after turning him into a second-rate street samurai?
Was this decided by the devs due to the fact that deepweed grants dual nature even if you're an adept or mystical adept who does not posess astral perception?
Or has it something to do with its connection to houngans and an incident in YotC i heard about somewhere that gave voudoun a particularly bad rep?
Was it decided to enable players to claim that somone should legalize the weed even though THC is legal in 2070?
Or was it an oversight, in the same way as it
must be an oversight that betameth is twice as expensive as novacoke?