Hero [TL10]
This drug is produced for the ‘primitive’ [TL8 and below] trade, and it’s typically made by those who see nothing wrong with calling members of sentient species ‘primitives’ to their face. Hero is a variant of the ancient Terran drug heroin that combines blissful pain relief, a boosting of the subject’s general health, and artificially-boosted addictive properties. Effects: deep euphoria for thirty minutes; +1 to HT rolls, Hard to Kill 1, and Resistance to Disease (+3) for twenty four hours. Multiple doses have no extra effect, but do not result in overdoses.
Unfortunately, Hero is physiologically and psychologically addictive, and all rolls to withdraw are at -15. Put another way: most people on this drug have to keep taking it or else either die, or go insane. There is a standard blocker shot that will override the withdrawal pangs, allowing the subject to survive being weaned off of the drug, but it’s generally tightly controlled by the same people who were distributing Hero in the first place. Reproducing the blocker itself is routine at TL10, a challenging but attainable exercise at TL9, and an epic struggle at TL8.
Hero has been sold as a drug for combat, performance enhancer, and even party drug – but what it’s typically used for is as a tool for social control. Unscrupulous planetary regimes with access to offplanet criminal networks import the stuff to control dissenters; while any even halfway ethical interplanetary government will make Hero Legality Class 0, there always seems to be another distributor out there. As a result, more than one Galactic Patrol has simply ended up assuming that possession of a crate or more of Hero is prima facie evidence of illegal activities, and reacted accordingly.
The actual point cost for Addiction to Hero varies: it’s cheap and legal on planets where it’s being used to control the population [+0], and expensive and illegal elsewhere else [-10]. The combination of combined penalties to withdrawal rolls and the dual psychological/physiological withdrawal effects, justifies at least [-20] points.
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