what does recreational drug use in the Protectorate look like? how does that differ from, say, Uxaion or Terzocco?
so in the protectorate, the answer is 'whattya want?' Laws and regulations around them are of mixed enforcement, so obviously, some are illegal but it's still an interconnected set of city-states with a LOT of travel between them and people buy shit.
The big protectorate 'legal' drugs are alcohol and 'growns' (sometimes nicknamed the category of 'wine and weeds') - mushrooms and tobacco and mairjuana and cloves, things of varying degrees of available if you can grow them in your own basement kinda thing. 'Weeds' typically refers to something that you can grow but like, you need a deliberate process to make it actually do much. Like, you need to roll it up and smoke it, or boil it, or process it in some small-batch way, then it counts. Mushrooms are in some cases considered illegal because it's like leaving poisons out where a kid or animal could consume it. Kinda 'if you have this where we can see it, you're in trouble, but nobody's coming to find it.'
There's definitely enforcement to prevent some drugs being illegal, but there's an assumption that if whatever it is recognisably a plant, it's 'probably fine.' Note that this includes stuff like Widow's Weed, which is a super common contraceptive medication that if you have tea made out of it daily during a cycle, you're basically unable to conceive for the rest of the cycle.
(some say that heavy doses of concentrated and roasted widow's weed can work as an abortificant, but that's surely just an old wive's tale, and the central medical controls aren't really a thing).
The big thing is that if the material is nonmagical - like if it passes through antimagic fields and magical inspection without a reaction? - then it's considered 'not dangerous', so it's typically let through. And that's a LOT of things! That's hallucinogenic mushrooms, sentient moulds that connect you temporarily to a hive mind where everyone can imagine for one another, and hadalan poisons!
Terzocco on the other hand, has a lot of laws against dangerous psychoactive materials. Wine and weeds are allowed but all the really fancy stuff, things that requires magical consumption, that stuff is DANGEROUS, and you must be protected from it. Imagine the War on Drugs as a fantasy LARP. LIke, yes, that bad. I know Terzocco sucks, but this is just one of those things that someone can come up with like it's an RP plot to do an Operation Rampart on some community somewhere.
Uxaion's ruling class are largely all undead, so almost all their drugs are in some way processing literal life, days of being alive and sensations of it. There's even a rug people in the poor areas consume, called Toothrot, that's a pretty solid depressant, you know just puts you to sleep and calms the nerves and anxiety except it's also sending a tiny bit of your ghost to the central reserve of the batch so a bunch of undead liches can fucking snort it.
OVER IN HECSENFORE, by the way, there are specialists that are known delicately as Steeds and indelicately as Snufflers: People who get high so vampires can feed on them and get the same high. They're paid very well because they also have to keep in top condition and pass a lot of medical regulations. They vary from your 'numinous and glowing pathetic twink who recites poetry as he's feasted on' to you know, person built like an ox who works out to keep the vampire safe while they're blitzed out of their brains