Cocaine is the top illegal import into the United States.

I often joke that I started writing Blue Star so that I wouldn’t have to take up a real drug habit. That shit can be real nasty, yo. Like meth? Yeah, I am never trying that—the visuals they used in middle school of people tearing their skin off with cheese graters and their fingernails and stuff really stuck with me.

Anyway. Blue Star, in the story, is the street name for this drug I made up. It’s first and foremost a hallucinogen like LSD, but it’s got these crazy other properties too. So what do I need to do? Research. As always.

To Google!

I managed to find one really really good site about drugs, and the reason why I remember it and can give you the URL is because I copied it down for further research.

Erowid

The biggest bunch of stuff I pulled was obviously about hallucinogens; I snagged oral dosages about LSD, as well as the common forms (blotter, liquid, gelatin). Did I stop there? No. I grabbed the charts for intravenous heroin dosages, oral AMT dosages, oral MDMA dosages and how long they lasted, and oral Morning Glory seed dosages, just for a laugh. I averaged out some things, using LSD as the primary base for Star, and came up with stuff for the story.

I knocked up a bogus-but-good-enough chemical name for the new drug, a few street names, classification, symptoms, duration of symptoms (how long the drug's in the system, basically), and synthesis, and then got down to how it was used. You gotta figure this stuff out, you know--legal and illegal uses, how it gets on the black market, whether or not you can cut it with other stuff and if you can make your own. Yeah, a lot of this is all just in the background, but it's good to know just in case it comes up in the story. And yes, I know that if I wanted to I could just make everything up and not give a damn about the real world, but where's the fun in that?

(And for the people who are wondering where I got the title for this post, it's this chart.)