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[Felblood]

Dwarves with disposable income blowing it on tobacco and pipes, for happy thoughts, as opposed to expanding their collection of aluminum table ware, is more than reasonable. Whether the individual player is willing to waste valuable dwarfhours on smokebreaks should be a largely personal choice.

However, I don't don't see the dwarven putting up with anything much harder than that. Maybe I've just had to pick up the slack left by too many people who came to work high, but I can see the dwarven work ethic conflicting with the dietary requirements of a pot habit.

Imagine Urist McCraftsdwarf with his shop overflowing with finished goods. He says, "Where is that hauler boy got to? If he's lying around stoned again, I'm gonna have the hammerer stove his face in!"

[Sunday]

Couldn't help butting in - spent last year in Egypt & smoked hookahs pretty often.

The only way I could see them being more healthy than cigarettes is if you don't smoke them that often.  Shisha (hookah tobacco), has far more of the nasty additives than cigarette tobacco, and rather than smoking 5 min cigarette and then waiting an hour before smoking again, you end up sipping on the tube for 1-3 hours.  It's a lot of fun, but it is very, very bad for you.  Pipe smoking, on the other hand, is a bit more healthy - especially if you stay away from the super-sweet cased tobaccos - since you aren't supposed to inhale.  Same with cigars.

As for recreational drug use - I'm for it!  Anyone play Nethack?  There's a certain potion that makes you hallucinate when you take it - every turn every creature turns into a random creature and every item turns into a random item.  You can't tell who's your enemy and who's your friend, and you often end up killing your own pet.  Unless you're very careful.  Or you end up accidentally attacking townspeople/guards and having the whole town after you.  It's pretty cool.

[Vattic]

You could also tie this into religion, with self-denial and piety type churches pushing detox programs for junkies, and bloodshed and revelry type churches helping the dealers smuggle their dope.

I've already mentioned it but drugs can be an important part of religious practices, there is even a Christian church were they take triptamines, more specifically peyote cactus but still.

The war on drugs is a reasonably recent thing and although I don't advocate drugs use I still recognise that the war on drugs is a very one sided approach.

[Felblood]

Meh. Just because we didn't come to argue over them until recently doesn't mean dwarves can't argue over them in the year 205.

I like the idea of some churches having hallucinogen fueled vision quests; I just don't think that all churches should have them.

Really, the idea of different factions advocating the use of drugs, while others work to ban or otherwise impede the spread of drug use appeals to me.

It gives the politicians something to actually politic over.

If religion does get involved, having influential nobles join a particular church could result in the economic and criminal nature of an entire city to be altered. From prohibition era defiance, to shady goblin cartels replacing the newly banned local crops (your drug money fuels the goblin menace), to the whole fort trying to go cold turkey and spiraling into oblivion.

Perhaps dwarven science has only recently discovered particular uses for certain plants, and their use is as controversial in the dwarven universe as it is in ours.

[A_Fey_Dwarf]

Another use for drugs in dwarf fortress is giving them to your soldiers to boost their energy and keep them alert (less sleep?). Also a processed opium type drug should also be used for pain relief for soldiers when healing. The side effect - They become addicted to it after they are healed.

[Samyotix]

Did people in medieval times EVEN HAVE recreational drugs, I thought they were always too busy getting ruled over by fancy guys in castles and contracting the plague.

Europe produced a lot more wine in the middle ages then it does now; it was common to drink a mixture of water and wine for breakfast, with a "normal" daily dose of 1 to 2 liters, or 2-4 pints, per day for a man. The wine was drink with water and spices normally. Apple cider and similar stuff came around a bit later, and  was sold to workers and miners.

There were several reasons for this love of wine: a) adding wine to water was thought to be healthy and probably did help disinfect stuff a little; b) the Christian "bread and wine" motif apparently had a part in ending the dark age, and also the monks (who had copied and thus preserved roman writings for centuries) knew that the Romans, the guys who'd built all those temples and rules over all of Europe centuries before, had had bread and wine -> being into wine was the fashionable thing to do for recently converted Christians.
Thus bread (which requires a miller, and an oven, and some infrastructure) replaced "boiled grains" as the main foodstuff when the middle age set in, and people wanted to drink wine, partly for religious reasons.

As for other drugs ... much of the European "herb lore" has been lost apparently, though there are some psychoactive substances around. It was highly dangerous being a healer though: Medieaeval people assumed that God controls anything that happens, including of course disease and accidents. Meddling with God's will by curing the dying? Burn him! (AFAIK more people were killed for having attempted to cure someone than for having attempted evil withcraft.)

I've read a report about "witch salve" somewhere on the web - some medical students brewing up a salve of pig fat (lard), thorn apple / jimson weed, nightshade/banewort, and other supposed ingredients of witch salve. A female volunteer then "rode the broomstick" (= applied the salve to the mucous membranes in her genital area), and promptly had all the symptoms reported for the witches' carnival / bedevilment / esbat:
Loss of orientation, a feeling of flying and being yanked through the air, horror hallucinations, sexual arousal, and a bit later vomiting and stomach cramps. They descriibed it, iirc, as being a bit like a very bad LSD trip except you're constantly falling from a great height and have the strong urge to get yourself penetrated by bladed tentacles.


... as for DF, hmm, I'm not sure addictive drugs would make that much fun as an addition. They weren't any fun in Fallout either, imo.  
Implementing it would be easy though: Dwarves with a personality trait e.g. "fond of the herb" could e.g. grab some plant - rope reed or pig tail, depending on whether they prefer Indoor or Outdoor - and smoke it during their break.  :-)

[Athisus]

You could give the dwarves nutmeg, which is an extreamly low grade hallucinogen when taken in large doses. Seriously, look it up.

[Felblood]

I don't think real world drugs should make it in. Dwarves don't even grow normal potatoes.

However, if drugs do make it in, they should be handled as realistically as possible, without having to be specific analogues to anything.

Smoked intoxicants should make habitual users short of breath, while harder drugs should completely destroy the usefulness of a dwarf to society, or even be very dangerous.

I can see dwarves cooking up some kind of amphetamines out of minerals and lye, and then killing themselves/their customers with the stuff.

Dwarves who are high should fail to notice when they are hungry, so that when they finally do come down, they have the munchies. Really nasty stuffs could even kill addicts through starvation.

Whatever he's on, a dwarf's body should adapt and become resistant much faster than a human. The cost of getting enough nerbs for his next fix could become prohibitive.

Fun fact: Many believe Napoleon was addicted to arsenic, a narcotic metal popular among megalomaniacs. To stay alive, an addict needs to keep ingesting ever larger doses, or die of arsenic poisoning. Fun.

[JoshuaFH]

Fun fact: Many believe Napoleon was addicted to arsenic, a narcotic metal popular among megalomaniacs. To stay alive, an addict needs to keep ingesting ever larger doses, or die of arsenic poisoning. Fun.

How the hell does that work?

[Mel_Vixen]

It doesnt cause arsen is deadly in amounts over 50 miligrams.

[flabort]

ooh, ooh, i found out today that the most recent, but not the up coming, version has more than just roasts for the extravagant meals.

"plump helmet salad"
contained plump helmet grown in muddy cinnabar, cat tallow, dwarven vodka, and some more plump helmet, from the same patch.

try smoking that!

[SirHoneyBadger]

For tobacco and tobaccolike products, I wouldn't, personally, give my dwarfs any health problems, due to their unusually tough constitution, and the idea that the tobacco they'd be smoking wouldn't have any harmful additives.

I figure dwarfs have better than human lungs, hearts, and livers, anyway.

The harder stuff like opium would be a different story, and hallucinogenics and psychosis-inducing drugs, like peyote, might actually hit them harder than a human being, due to dwarfs' emotional problems/possibly weird brain chemistry.

[G-Flex]

ooh, ooh, i found out today that the most recent, but not the up coming, version has more than just roasts for the extravagant meals.

Huh? I've never, ever seen this mentioned anywhere, not in-game or in the dev logs either.

Either I'm wrong, or you're hallucinating, or... something.

[Foa]

Yeah, the normal tobacco is actually a lot healthier than any real world tobacco, they add poison and drugs in it, so dwarves get the healthier variety, and additives like elf bones are to be added into the material before smoking.

So party/break time/siesta apparatuses are to be placed, most likely a hookah, and portable ones are usually pipes/joints/bongs, right?

Oh, and dwarves are dwarves, immune to addiction and poisoning, racially bound to the buzz.

[G-Flex]

If anyone has hardy lungs, it's dwarves, although I don't think any drug should be considered COMPLETELY harmless to the game, except maybe in very rare cases attributes to individual creature types or something.

Obviously, even perfectly natural tobacco, even smoked through a damn water pipe, is pretty unhealthy, if for the nicotine alone.