Heroin was originally intended to be used to cure opium users of their addiction.
Yeah, science marched all over that one...
As long as they are plant-based, and don't require any serious processing, I don't see any reason to disallow narcotics/hallucinogenics, and other such drugs.
Disallowing such drugs, for no realistic reason, would be just the same as putting something like crystal meth
into the game, for no
realistic reason.
I'm a little exhausted of this argument, so here's a Wall of Text.
This isn't a game that's being marketed specifically for kids, afterall. Young kids aren't all that likely to stumble upon it, either. And, as far as I know, ToadyOne isn't a parent.
I'd personally find the idea of raising, skinning, and eating kittens, to be a lot more traumatizing and damaging for a child to be exposed to, than adding a plant that "makes dwarfs act funny".
I would atleast
hope that a little kid would better understand the concept of what a living kitten was, than what the extended possibility of longterm opium addiction could lead to.
I'd also rather explain to a child what opium was, than why Fuzzball's being served in a mushroom glaze...
Disregarding for a moment that that's a situation I would never, ever, put myself into.
I
certainly wouldn't be going out of my way to explain
any concepts in the game that I would consider disturbing or troubling to a child, in the first place.
Because you'd
have to go far out of your way to cause a child damage with this game. Because the game is barely comprehensible to an
adult, unless that adult is already familiar with the game, and has actually sat down and played it.
One of the great advantages of ASCII.
Our society has a pretty deep fascination with violence, and this is a game that contains
violence. That doesn't make including such violence any more morally upstanding, or tasteful, than including drug use, or sex, or gambling, or crime, or
alchohol abuse, or anything else.
Not allowing drugs into any given game could be done as simply as not following the necessary actions that lead to any
other processed plant item, in the game. If you don't want pigtail socks, don't grow pigtails. Don't
harvest pigtails. Don't make a "create pigtail sock" job. Not allowing drugs would be every bit as simple, and would require zero special coding.
If you somehow ended up with drugs, through a bizarre chain of coincidences, then just disallow them, like you would any other object.
Anyone incapable of choosing not to make these kinds of choices for themselves, should probably not ever be allowed near the Internet.
I make the choice not to slaughter cats or dogs of any age, every time I play DF. It's there, it's available for me to use to my heart's sick content, and it would actually make the game easier, but it's simply an aspect of the game that I make the choice to avoid and disavow myself of, without demanding it's absence or removal from the game.
Drugs aren't any different, in any way shape or form.