And saving the <s>best</s> worst for last, @VD:
Also, weren't there junkies in The Hub? Wasn't there one that gave you a quest near the Maltese Falcon? Methinks you're glorifying your precious prequel too much, when Fallout 2 only built up on some of these themes.
Jet is made out of Brahmin crap, dumbass.Vault Dweller said::facepalm:
Is thinking frowned upon where you come from? Everything was nuked to hell in 2077. The Jet hit the streets in 2241. How much glue/paint/solvent you can find in the department stores 170 years after the war?
So now drugs are no longer recreational and the only point in them is in selling them. Why do people buy them? Because they're sold. Truly a genius mind, yours.Vault Dweller said:Because the Fallout setting isn't a decadent, crumbling society. It's a fucking wasteland. The civilization has been wiped clean. Good riddance and all that.
What are drugs? An opportunity to make a lot of money. For whom? For chemists, for gangs, for transporters. Well, things are very different in the wasteland:
Also, weren't there junkies in The Hub? Wasn't there one that gave you a quest near the Maltese Falcon? Methinks you're glorifying your precious prequel too much, when Fallout 2 only built up on some of these themes.
What the hell? It's a big wasteland with nothing to do save toil your ass for days on end or gun down whatever motherfucker comes your way so you can buy your fix and keep on flyin'. I'm sure a post-apocalyptic world would be filled with the former people, of the hard-working kind. Riiight.1. Anyone who has a working knowledge of chemistry will make a lot more money/goods making literally priceless healing pills (painkillers, antibiotics, fever/cough medicine, etc). There is simply no reason to waste time on recreational drugs anymore, especially considering the addictive factor, which is our next point.
For your own good, stay the fuck out of post-apocalyptic settings. This is nothing but bad fanfiction. The dealer-consumer chain is still profitable since people would buy drugs anyway because not every person on Earth, post-apocalyptic or not, is a hard-working stereotype. There were lots of junkies in Fallout 1, both in the Hub as I've mentioned and in Junktown (remember the Skull gang?). They're a sad part of humanity, but a part still; there will always be people out there for the quick entertainment cash-in, as we so have presentiated in our beloved genre.2. PA communities are small. Every man counts, every pair of hands needed. In the modern societies nobody really gives a fuck that junkies, useless shite, and bored college kids use drugs. They aren't needed, to put it simply. In a PA world nobody can afford to feed a man who's fucking high all the time, a man who doesn't take care of things but has to be taken care of, a man who can spread this disease. So, I'd say there is 99% chance that anyone who's using drugs will be kicked out and die in the wasteland. A trader who brings drugs will probably be killed as a lesson to others because he weakens communities - a sin that won't be tolerated.
Drugs don't necessarily kill. In fact, Myron was experimenting on ways to lower the morbidity rate and increase the addiction potential. Also, stimpaks, as far as I can tell, were helluva expensive and you could only get Myron to make them out of Xander roots and Broc flowers which didn't grow by the thousands, while Jet was made out of mutated cow shit. Economics, VD, do you understand them?Not to mention that modern cities provide endless supply of drug-users. Who cares if 10,000 people die? There is more where they came from. In a PA world with few survivors, one can't afford to lose even a single customers, which is why making healing medicine is a much more profitable occupation for a chemist.
For the same reason you're not a farmer: because in Shady Sands you have to toil your ass under the sun to get a decent living while you can live off the sweat of other people's backs if you have a drug "empire" under your hands. This stuff is pretty basic, man.3. Gangs. In the modern world small gangs live in abandoned buildings and shacks, while drug cartels enjoy the comfort of villas, hot chicks, swimming pools, and every possible luxury. Well, in a PA world it's either abandoned, semi-destroyed buildings or shacks. There is nothing else there. A small gang can easily take over a place like Shady Sands, having the villagers to work for them. This will be as close to luxury as it will get for a very long time. What reason would they have to look for chemists, start expensive production and test trials, establish distribution channels, ensure protection, which sounds like a major fucking headache, when they can already live like kings in Shady Sands?