Everybody Must Get Stoned

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Okay, this is like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the parallel universe where everything's the same except everyone is on heroin."

—Beth, News Radio

Most or all of the cast is exposed to some kind of mood-altering substance and start behaving very strangely, usually by acting out normally-inhibited impulses. Often includes elements of Only Sane Man, who has to figure out what's happening and neutralize the effect.

If only one or two characters are affected, then it's Intoxication Ensues. If the substance is specifically an aphrodisiac, then it's Love Is in the Air. If it's the other way around and it makes everyone really sensitive and moody, then it's the Hate Plague. If it causes hallucinations, it's a Mushroom Samba. When it really is pretty much everyone, and The Government or some other powerful organization forcing everyone to be on drugs, then it's Government Drug Enforcement.

Trope Name is the lyric from Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" (leading, incidentally, to one of the more notable musical instances of Non-Appearing Title and Refrain From Assuming). It's also used by Cypress Hill from their album "Temple of Boom".

Not to be confused with Taken for Granite.

Examples of Everybody Must Get Stoned include:

Anime and Manga


Literature

  • In the Illuminatus-trilogy the protagonists at one point must take a dose of LSD each before entering a rock festival sponsored by the Ancient Conspiracy in order to prevent the enemy psychics from reading their minds. They needn't have bothered, since someone had already put the stuff in the water supply. Ofcourse this being Illuminatus, the protagonists keep getting stoned repeatedly anyway for fun, sport and enlightenment. It even includes Franklin Delano Roosevelt giving a good word for the stuff.
    • A briefer episode within the book features the heroes drugging a meeting of the Knights of Christianity, United in Faith (KCUF) with "A.U.M.", a psychoactive drug that makes the imbiber both extremely imaginative and extremely gullible, leading them to concoct wild theories out of mid-air and believe them to be true. By the end of their one-hour get-together, they've renounced Christ and adopted geocentrism.
      • Well, the story only followed one of them further - his initial reaction was belief that his fellow Knights may be homosexuals, and that the Earth is probably flat. Later on he's interviewed in radio as a respected astrophysicist who through his new found thirst for knowledge quickly disproved the flat-earth theory and went on to study the actual evidence. It's left unknown what became of the rest of the Knights.
  • Naked Lunch features several scenes in which groups of people unwittingly ingest a mood-altering drug.
  • The whole point of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
  • In The Pale King, Chris mentions how common and easy it was to obtain drugs in college.


Film

  • Any given Cheech and Chong film.
  • In The Faculty, the aliens have an adverse reaction to Zeke's homemade drugs that causes them to die instantly. The group snorts the drugs to prove to each other they are not infected. This leads to its own problem of not only are they being pursued by alien body snatchers, but now they are high as well.


Live Action TV

  • In the Star Trek franchise, this is a time-honored tradition:
    • The original series has "The Naked Time", in which a disease makes everyone get progressively drunker, and a Hate Plague created by a malevolent Energy Being. In "This Side of Paradise", something was in the air that made an irradiated planet inhabitable, but made everyone happy and wanting to stay forever—except Captain Kirk.
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation gives "The Naked Time" a sequel, "The Naked Now", which didn't go over very well. (It didn't help that a drunk Wesley Crusher is still smarter than the rest of the cast combined.) There was also a telepathically-spread Vulcan disease that an ill Sarek spread, causing emotions to run rampant. A much milder example happened in "Night Terrors," in which not dreaming made the crew get a little ornery and forget things they were about to say by the end of the episode. (Maybe the writers thought it was a lot more dramatic than it turned out to be.)
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation also had the episode "The Game", in which aliens got the crew addicted to a video game that made them really mellow in order to take over the ship. Data, not being susceptible, had to be put out of commission. Guess who saved the ship...
    • Deep Space Nine had a Love Is in the Air episode, and one in which the entirety of the base's personnel (except for Odo, who gets to be the Only Sane Man due to being goo in his true form) turn against each other, acting out an alien conflict, due to a Phlebotinum-ized disease.
      • The weird thing was that it was explicitly stated to have only affected the people in Ops at a specific time and the solution involved curing only those people. But the whole crew did indeed seem affected during the episode.
    • Voyager: The Maquis crew members were Brainwashed into trying to take over the ship by a message from home containing hidden signals from one of the last surviving Maquis. This sort of thing happened to the Voyager crew more than once, though.
    • Enterprise had "Singularity," in which a Negative Space Wedgie makes everyone obsess over trivial things. This one had many a Crowning Moment of Funny:

Redshirt: "Ensign, if we don't serve something soon, we'll have a riot on our hands."
Hoshi, who'd taken over for ailing chef: "Is this too salty? Something's not right... Hand me the Kreetassan spice, I'll add it to the stock. And I'm out of carrots."
Redshirt: "There are twenty-five crew waiting.."
Hoshi: "CARROTS!"

  • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Band Candy". Since the band candy made you act like a teenager, only the adult characters were visibly affected, which lead to some amusing role reversals.
    • This trope was also verbally invoked for a laugh in "Spiral", when no one but Spike can recall Ben turning into Glory because of the magical block.

Spike: Are you all very stoned?

  • The Angel episode "Spin the Bottle" has a spell backfiring, resulting in all the characters being mentally regressed to their teenage years. Hilarity Ensues.
    • Oh, and Fred is shown to have used Pot A LOT as a teen.
  • The Eureka episode "Purple Haze".
  • Power Rangers:
  • That '70s Show: Not only do the main characters smoke weed on a regular basis, there has been an episode where some marijuana-laced brownies are accidentally eaten by Red and Kitty (who would never voluntarily get stoned). Hilarity Ensues
  • The Monkees: episode “Mijacogeo: The Frodis Caper.” The Monkees must save the world from the evil work of Wizard Glick, who is “hypnotizing” everyone’s mind through televisions emitting “frodis” power. You figure out the rest.
  • In Smallville Red Kryptonite has this affect on Kryptonians and has been used so much that characters in show have referenced it anytime a Kryptonian has been acting odder than usual. Producers only wanted to use it for season 2 and the season three opener, but the Network loved it and insisted that it get more use in the series than was ever intended.
    • Fans also have a theory that green Kryptonite works in this manner for non-Kryptonian characters. The theory's helped by one of the books having a gang get temporary powers from Kryptonite-irradiated berries, which are treated exactly like a drug.
      • The episodes Nicodemus and Rush had people lose their inhibitions due to a rare pollen and ancient (possibly Kryptonian) parasites, respectively. In both these episodes, Clark is pretty much the only one not affected in Rush, however, Chloe and Pete use Red Kryptonite to make him join them.
  • In an episode of Farscape, named "Crackers Don't Matter" everyone on board Moya is affected by the work of a passenger they take on board. Here, it's a case of the light that the insect-like alien produces, sending the entire crew crazy, due to it affecting the optic nerve, with John remaining slightly more coherent due to his comparatively poor eyesight. This is probably one of the funniest episodes in the entire series and certainly the first time the viewer sees just how well Browder does crazy.
  • Not satisfied with characters that changed personalities from week to week, Dollhouse sprung one of these only seven episodes in. The vibrant green neurochemical affects normals and dolls differently. When it touches unaltered humans it has "Naked Now"-like effects, and Hilarity Ensues. Conversely, it hits dolls more slowly resulting in PTSD-like flashbacks.
  • The sit com Barney Miller had an episode where one of the detectives brought his girlfriend's homemade brownies into the squad room. High-larity ensues.
  • The sit com Taxi had one of these as well, where Latka brought in some cookies made with his old country grandmother's favorite recipe. Everyone proceeded to get completely stoned, except Jim, who sampled the cookies, looked thoughtful, and then said "Columbia". He samples a bit more, and says "1979" (the episode aired in 1981). He samples a bit more, and says "North mountains". He samples a bit more, and says "Before the rains". The parody of coffee and wine snobs identifying a vintage by taste, and the idea that Jim was enough of an expert to do this with marijuana, was hysterically funny.
  • In Trailer Park Boys, the lead characters are always doing it (even when they're in prison) and almost everyone does at some time or other.
  • Stargate SG-1 had something like this in the episode "The Light." The whole team gets pretty stoned. (Poor Loran.)
  • The CONTROL spies of Get Smart drank drugged water that had everyone hallucinate. Max had a vision of taking care of a baby alligator instead of his baby and the Chief was playing pool with George Washington and he was cheating.
  • In the 100th episode of 30 Rock, a gas leak causes the cast of TGS to act stranger than usual. Liz calls her jerk of an ex-boyfriend, Jack argues with his past, alternate-universe, and future selves, and Tracy tries to shoot Kenneth. In the end, the show is about to go on and all the writing was done when they were gassed-up, and the new CEO is about to cancel it. The solution? another gas leak to make the audience think it's funny.
  • In the The Big Bang Theory episode "The Adhesive Duck Deficiency", Howard accepts some homemade cookies from a pair of nice fifty-something ladies in a VW bus wearing tie-dyed shirts. He then shares the cookies with Raj and Leonard. They all get completely baked, eat all their provisions and miss the Leonid meteor shower that they were there to see entirely.


Video Games

  • World of Warcraft features an annual Valentine's Day event, Love Is In The Air, which revolves around NPCs around the game world being unusually amiable to each other. A quest which the player can embark upon leads to the discovery that the "love plague" is the invention of a Forsaken alchemist, in a failed attempt to spread lovey-doveyism worldwide in order to prime it for invasion.
  • Mother 3 features a segment where all the human members of your party must eat mushrooms to continue; their HP has been dropped to 1, their PP to zero, and they've lost all their items, so there's no other way to gain enough HP to pass even the first monster (whose speed is maxed out, and always starts with an attack that hits everyone in the party).[1] Boney refuses to eat the mushrooms, and it turns out that he was smart to avoid them: the three humans end up hallucinating wildly for the next segment of the game, with only Boney's reactions being proper clues to what's really going on.


Western Animation

  • In the Futurama episode "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid", an invasion of knowledge-devouring Brainspawn causes everyone on Earth to fall into ditzy levels of stupidity. Everyone except for Fry, who lacks certain types of brainwaves as the result of being his own grandfather.
    • Another episode had everyone on Earth completely intoxicated after millions of atom-sized Benders converted the planet's water into beer.
  • In one episode of Daria, the Morgendorffers go camping. Jake finds some berries and everyone except Daria eats them. Soon they're running around the woods talking about glitter berries and spirit animals, and have to be air-lifted out.
  • At the end of the South Park episode about how ratings control the news, it turns out everyone is stoned.
    • "Smug Alert" has this with all the kids in Los Angeles due to their parents self absorbed to the point of loving the smell of their own farts. It doesn't take long for Kyle (age 9) and Ike (age 3-4) to get trashed on acid.
  • Care Bears: Adventures in Care-A-Lot has the episode where Grizzle sends down a robot that is equipped with a beam that he believes to be capable of wiping out the bears' belly badges. What it did instead was bring out the bears' negative traits (side effects include dulling the bears' color and reversing the bears' belly badges). And then there's another episode where Grizzle's plan to use a love potion on the Care Bears backfire as said bottle of love potion ends up in Oopsy's hands and he uses too much of it on himself.


Webcomics

  • In one Horndog story line, the main character takes LSD and believes a spilled bottle of Faygo Red Pop is blood.
  1. ↑ Of course, if you want to fill out the Battle Memory, you'll have to face it and tank a loss before eating the mushrooms, anyway
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