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Everybody Must Get Stoned

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Ha ha ha, "this high."

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

Most or all of the cast are exposed to some kind of mood-altering substance or object 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. Either that or the majority of the cast is either drinking or using drugs and gets either drunk or high and maybe frisky.

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 is forcing everyone to be on drugs, then it's Government Drug Enforcement. If everyone is enjoying a work that is best appreciated under the influence, then it's Watch It Stoned.

It will frequently involve a good member of the cast breaking out the Large Ham... and commonly at least one member of the cast losing some of their clothing.

Trope Namer is the lyric from Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35." Ironically, the lyric may or may not be about stoning in the Biblical sense and not a drug reference at all. It's also used by Cypress Hill from their album "Temple of Boom".

Not to be confused with Taken for Granite.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • In The Vision of Escaflowne, the Big Bad's secret weapon, the Zone of Absolute Fortune, causes everyone affected to immediately pursue what they've always wanted. Nations who united only to fight a common enemy decide to resolve their differences with weapons of mass destruction, protagonists with military backgrounds get turned into Blood Knights, and so on.
  • In the Cowboy Bebop episode "Mushroom Samba", Ed and Ein test mushrooms they found on the rest of the crew. Cue hilarious montages of them tripping out while the rest of the episode's plot plays out around them.

    Fan Works 
  • Vision of Escaflowne Abridged has fun on just what causes Hitomi's visions: turns out that Magic: The Gathering cards are laced with LSD.
  • In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Smurfnip Madness", the Smurfs eat smurfnip-laced smurfberries and start getting really silly, with one of the Smurfs actually singing a Smurf version of a Bob Dylan song.
  • There's a Digimon Tamers one-shot where Takato has broken his leg (Kazu's fault) and Kazu, Henry, and Kenta show up to keep him company one evening. They end up watching an incredibly dumb movie that Kazu suddenly starts finding funny at a very unfunny part. No one's sure what's wrong with him until Kenta bites into one of Takato's pain pills that were in his popcorn. Turns out the bottle spilled into the popcorn and everyone except Henry took at least a little. Cue Henry playing Only Sane Man to his varying-degrees-of-stoned teammates.
  • In the penultimate episode of the first season of RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse, Zecora attempts to perform a Zebra ritual to put all of Ponyville in an enchanted sleep. However, she is interrupted, and the curse misfires. The mutated curse causes anyone who gets drunk to stay drunk, unable to pass out or sober up, and compels them to try and get everyone else drunk. Before anyone realizes what's happening, all the Ponyville adults are roaring drunk and tearing the town apart in their delirium. It falls on Dinky Doo and a few of her friends to break the curse.
  • Most of the firemen get high from brownies that they didn’t know were pot brownies in the Emergency! fic “The Buzz”.
  • Two examples from Sunset Shimmer Is Mad About Everything and its sequels
    • A downplayed example in the original story, used as a Brick Joke with "brain pills":
      In Chapter 2:
      Sunset narrowed her eyes and motioned to herself with a forehoof. “I’m acting this way because half of you seemed to have skipped your meds or brain pills today or something…”
      “Not fair!” Pinkie exclaimed. “I took a double dose of brain pills and made sure every pony I know had some too!” she said in an objectionable tone.
      In Chapter 22:
      “You said it, Flim!” replied another stallion’s voice. “Ponies just can’t get enough of these brain pills.”
      “Right you are, Flam! Too bad they actually impede intelligence and merely being around them, much like we are right now, makes a pony uncontrollably exposition every little thing they’re doing!”
    • In The Beard with a Jerk-Ass Hanging off of It, most of the cast spend the story getting drunk because it's the only way they can stand being around said jerk-ass.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Ali G Indahouse during a tense UN meeting, Ali slips into the kitchen and brews a large batch of Marijuana Tea , which soon turns the room into a giggling party. Artistic License – Pharmacology; THC isn't water soluable, cannabis tea can be made, but requires more ingredients than just water and weed.
  • In The Faculty, the aliens have an adverse reaction to Zeke's homemade drugs that cause 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. Subverted in that it's just caffeine pills being sold as hard drugs. Turns out the aliens can't handle even the mild dehydration caused by caffeine.
  • In Shrooms, the main characters travel to Ireland to collect magic mushrooms and go tripping together. They brew a mushroom that they all drink the next morning (save one who drank it during the night and then vanished), and head into the woods to look for their missing friend. And that's when their troubles really start...
  • This seems to be the attitude of everyone attending the Free Love Festival in The Tripper. Plenty of intoxicants are available, either openly or covertly. There is even a booth selling nitrous balloons for people to inhale. Sam's friends spend the entire film smoking weed, taking ecstasy, and even snorting coke in Jade's. Even Sam, who is intending to stay straight, gets doused with acid and undergoes an involuntary trip.
    Joey: Welcome to Free Love Festival, where America's best and brightest come to celebrate...
    Jade: Freedom?
    Joey: Yes! Freedom to do drugs - lots of fucking drugs!

    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. Of course, 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 newfound 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.
  • Happens in the novelization of One Foot in the Grave, courtesy of a batch of spiked mince pies.
  • In The Silver Chair, C. S. Lewis plays this trope for drama when the Big Bad shuts the heroes in the room with her and burns a relaxing, mind-numbing incense to accompany her Mind-Control Music.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Danger 5: The '80s Danger 5 all snort coke with impunity, even Claire.
  • 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 "Day of the Dove" in which a Hate Plague was 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:
      • It 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 happens 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.)
      • 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, has to be put out of commission. Guess who saved the ship...
    • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had a Love Is in the Air episode 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.
    • Star Trek: 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.
    • Star Trek: Enterprise has "Singularity," in which a Negative Space Wedgie makes everyone obsess over trivial things.
      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!
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • The 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 Kryponite-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.
  • Farscape:
    • In "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.
    • There's also "Meltdown", where a rupture in Talyn's systems results in him spilling mist that heightens certain character traits in each person. Stark gets penitent and hung up on The Lost Lenore while making their current crisis a bit worse, Crais embraces his inner screaming control freak, Rygel can't stop eating, and John and Aeryn can barely keep from banging each other up one side of Talyn and down the other.
  • Not satisfied with characters that changed personalities from week to week, Dollhouse sprung one of these only 7 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 sitcom Barney Miller had an episode where one of the detectives brought his girlfriend's homemade brownies into the squad room. High-larity ensues.
  • The sitcom 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 "Peru". He samples a bit more and says "1974" (the episode aired in 1981). He samples a bit more, and says "Southern Peru". 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 coca leaves, 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 Big Bang Theory episode "The Adhesive Duck Deficiency", Howard accepts some homemade cookies from a pair of nice fiftysomething 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.
  • The Just Shoot Me! episode "Lemon Wacky Hello" (the former Trope Namer for Intoxication Ensues), where the main cast got high accidentally from eating Chinese "candy".
  • The Mad Men episode "The Crash" had most of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce getting pretty wacky after dosing up on the "energy serum" prescribed by Cutler's doctor while working over the weekend on the Chevy account.
  • The Librarians 2014 has "And the Apple of Discord", which involves an object that turns people into the worst versions of themselves.
  • The X-Files episode "Syzygy" has everyone in a small town get on-edge, paranoid, and bitchy as a result of a particular planetary alignment. Mulder and Scully join in by going at each other's throats.
  • In the Playing House episode "Ride the Dragon", Zach makes pot-laced baklava for Emma to alleviate her chemo-induced nausea, but she decides to share the baklava with her friends, resulting in them all getting stoned. And then Zach decides to eat one because he refuses to be the only not-stoned person there.
  • The Sliders episode "Just Say Yes" featured a society where the use of mood- and perception-altering drugs is mandatory, and people can be arrested for non-possession.
  • Workaholics: the boys have prepared a large batch of MDMA infused water for a rave when they are unexpectedly called to help with Montez's wife's baby shower. The water ends up accidentaly being poured into the punch bowl, and soon the whole yard is vibing very hard.

    Music 

    Myths & Religion 
  • The Bible: In Jeremiah chapter 25, God has Jeremiah the prophet pass along a cup to all the kings of the earth for them to drink, which turns out to be "the cup of God's wrath", all for the purpose of getting the nations drunk to the point of destroying themselves so that they will fall and rise no more.
  • In The Odyssey, Homer gives us another Older Than Feudalism example, perhaps the Ur-Example. When Odysseus visits the land of the Lotus Eaters, his crew gets blitzed on lotus and he has to drag them back to the ship so they can continue their journey.

    Puppet Shows 
  • Fraggle Rock: In the episode "Bored Stiff", Junior found a bottle of Boredom Juice. Whoever got a whiff of it would stiffen up, become glassy-eyed, and respond to anything with a monotone "Boooo-ring!" Pa, in an attempt to do away with the Fraggles, sprayed the juice into the tunnel to the Gorgs' garden, hitting Wembley, Red, and Mokey. Gobo and Junior worked together to unbore them and convince Ma and Pa that the Fraggles should be allowed to live.

    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:
    • It 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).note  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.
    • This sequence gets revisited in crossover fangame Touhou Mother, but everybody gets high on the mushrooms. Marisa takes over as party lead for this segment since she uses magic mushrooms (to power her spells) so much normally that she's used to the side effects.
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: When clearing the pixie beans for human consumption, Congruence forgets to check for their effects on people undergoing puberty. Since the pixie beans get debuted as a food source right when Sol and their peers are in the early stages of puberty, they come out of their first time eating them in an unusually good mood. If Sol both eats the beans and discovers their drug-like effects themself during a shift in the xenobotany lab, it's a small miracle they get to the end of the experiment.
  • Grand Theft Auto Online:
    • The Short Trip mission "OG Kush" from The Contract update has Franklin and Lamar crash their weed van, which the latter claimed has body panels made with marijuana bioplastic, into the Tequi-La-La bar after gunfire from the Vagos in addition to the heatwave causing the van to burn up. The resulting impact causes patrons outside the bar to inhale the smoke coming from the van and get high as a result.
    • In the Los Santos Drug Wars update, when helping to set up the new gang, The Fooliganz with their new hideout in the mission "Uncontrolled Substances", the gang offers the player(s) a beer, which was laced with their new potent LSD, and the player(s) are then led through a psychedelic obstacle course of a mission.

    Web Animation 
  • Zsdav Adventures: Zsdav, Freezzy and Zsolti smoke mushrooms in Kiválasztott 2 (Chosen one 2) and together they start a forest fire.

    Webcomics 
  • In one Horndog storyline, the main character takes LSD and believes a spilled bottle of Faygo Red Pop is blood.

    Web Videos 
  • This is the main premise of the Highcraft series. Sometimes ends up with certain players taking numerous bong rips in a short period of time.

    Western Animation 
  • Futurama: "Benderama" has everyone on Earth completely intoxicated after millions of atom-sized Benders converted the planet's water into alcohol.
  • Daria: in the episode "The Teachings of Don Jake", the Morgendorffers go camping in order to escape from day to day stress. Jake, determined to forage for breakfast, 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.
  • South Park:
    • At the end of the episode about how ratings control the news, it turns out everyone is stoned.
    • Smug Alert has this with all the kids in San Francisco due to their parents being 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.
  • Zig-zagged in a now infamous episode of Ralph Bakshi's Mighty Mouse series. Mighty Mouse comes to the aid of Polly Pineblossom, a poor mouse girl who is taunted by the bully Big Murray, but Polly explains that there are others who need help more than her, and she gives our hero a flower, which dissolves into a powder. Later in the episode, after rescuing a colony of beach ants, Mighty Mouse takes the pulverized flower out in reflection of Polly's words, sniffs it, and it goes up his nose. A viewer claimed that Mighty Mouse was sniffing cocaine and Rev. Donald Wildmon took up the cause. Both CBS and Bakshi claimed nothing of the sort happened but the scene was cut out in ensuing screenings.
  • The Smurfs (1981):
    • Gargamel's Daredevil Dust, which makes the Smurfs act so reckless (not to mention so high) in the episode "Reckless Smurfs".
    • Also the Forget Me Flowers in "Forget Me Smurfs", which made the Smurfs who sniffed the flowers to forget about everything (and also made them look and act stoned).
    • Allura's magic orb from "Lure Of The Orb" makes several Smurfs act like they're on amphetamines.
    • And lastly the Giggle Glitter from "The Last Laugh" that made whoever was exposed to it laugh uncontrollably.
  • The Snorks episode "Reefberry Madness", where the Snorks eat reefberries laced with silly powder and start acting silly.
  • Archer, "El Contador": To avoid failing a drug test, Ray, Cheryl, and Pam pay Krieger for an "herbal cleanse" that will flush all the drugs out of their system. It results in everyone hallucinating, most of them getting naked, and Pam running feral and crazed through the ISIS offices while Krieger tries to subdue her.

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