Abstract

This article compares seven novels published from 1932 to 1980 which are set in drug dystopias in order to answer two questions. What are the effects and symbolic meanings of the fictional drugs they describe? Why are there so few examples of this subgenre? Today, their warnings about the reduction of populations to docility or of assaults on the integrity of individual minds seem overwrought, and the apparent passing of the subgenre need not be mourned. Two of the seven novels, however, Brave New World and A Scanner Darkly, continue to be read because they warn against more subtle forms of tyranny