When Science Fiction Writers Used Fictional Drugs: Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Drug Dystopia

The essay by John Hickman, called When Science Fiction Writers Used Fictional Drugs: Rise and Fall of the Twentieth-Century Drug Dystopia,  analyzes the use of dictional drugs in several novels that have been published in the past. One of the novels he analyzes that I have previously read is Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. John Hickman discusses the effects of the fictional drugs in these novels, and how come this subgenre has pretty much died out. These drug dystopias “served as vehicles for their authors to warn about the utility of pharmacology to tyranny either by the reduction of entire populations to docility or by assaults on the integrity of individual minds”, he says. These ideas were clearly seen in the films THX 1138, as well as in Fahrenheit 451.