Fictional drugs

"New Ridley Scott Movie Has Better Drugs Than 'Blade Runner'" blared a headline from the excellent science fiction blog io9 earlier this week.

Translation: "Blade Runner" director Ridley Scott will direct the first movie adaptation of Aldous Huxley's classic dystopian novel, "Brave New World" -- about a rigidly hierarchical future society in which the proles are pacified with pop culture and a freely dispensed drug called soma. Leonardo DiCaprio, who owns the movie rights, will probably star as the soma-eschewing "natural man" John the Savage.

Want to know more about soma? No problem. Coincidentally, earlier this week the Onion's A.V. Club posted a very amusing list of 18 fictional drugs -- from Star Trek's "synthenol" to "bananadine," a supposed hallucinogenic mentioned in a satirical March 1967 story in the Berkeley Barb; the story gave rise to the urban myth that you can get high by smoking banana peels.

No. 2 on the list? Soma. Read all about it:

In Aldous Huxley's prescient 1932 novel "Brave New World," the writer envisioned a scary and accurate future -- including a population dumbed down by designer drugs like soma, a psychedelic substance that helped enforce a weird kind of happy-go-lucky, hedonistic dystopia. Huxley had long been fascinated with Eastern culture, and he named the drug after an apocryphal Persian concoction that may or may not have incorporated alcohol, cannabis, and 'shrooms into one mind-expanding brew. But Huxley was far from a "just say no" type: His well-documented experiments with the mystic, enlightening properties of peyote, mescaline, and LSD showed that his beef was with authority and government regulation, not drugs themselves.

Fun fact: Huxley's 1954 book, "The Doors of Perception," which detailed his experiences while taking mescaline, inspired Jim Morrison to name his trippy rock band The Doors.