6: Screamers (1995) – Reds Intent: Stop the ambient radiation on the war-ravaged planet Sirius B from killing its inhabitants Side Effects: You don’t die.. Notes: The idea of cigarettes that prevent cancer is unique to Christian Duguay’s interpretation of the Philip K. Dick short story, and an obvious kick in the rear to political correctness. When a cloud of particularly dense radioactivity approaches the military base, a voice comes over the loud-speakers to order everyone to light up…

5: Star Trek: TOS ‘Mudd’s Women’ (1966) – The Venus Drug Intent: Make the user irresistibly attractive by enhancing their own natural charms – women become more alluring and men more aggressive. Side Effects: Wolf-whistles; unbidden sleazy saxophone solos. Notes: The lothario and entrepreneur Harcourt Mudd is dosing up his cargo of miners’ wives with the illegal Venus drug to ensure his procurement fees, until he ends up stranded with the fabulously attractive women on Kirk’s Enterprise. Kirk later gives one of the women a placebo and it works anyway – so it was all in the mind…

4: Scanners (1981) – Ephemerol Intent: The relief of morning sickness in pregnant women. Side effects: Rashes; dizziness; kids may end up with the ability to read other people’s thoughts whether they want to or not, to set other people on fire or even blow other people’s heads up in a nasty display of gore; Now available in strawberry. Notes: Ephemerol can also be used as inhibiting treatment for children whose mothers took the drug and who are now themselves ‘scanners’ (telepaths).

3: UFO (UK TV 1970) – ‘The Amnesia Drug’ Intent: To wipe the recent memory of unauthorised personnel who have discovered the existence of SHADO, a worldwide clandestine military organisation that is secretly protecting the human race from aliens who want to harvest human organs for their own dying species. Side Effects: Of what? Notes: In the episode ‘The Square Triangle’, SHADO Commander Ed Straker (Ed Bishop) was forced to wipe the memories of a man and a woman –lovers – who were conspiring to kill the woman’s husband. The illicit couple had encountered both aliens and SHADO, and once their memories of this were erased, they proceeded successfully with their murderous plot…as Straker well knew that they would. The drug itself is never named in the series, is usually administered by syringe – or by spiking a complimentary cup of tea in the SHADO waiting-area – and predates the flashing memory-wipers of the Men In Black – who needed their ‘neuraliser’ device for exactly the same reason – by two decades.

2: Brave New World – SomaIntent: Keep the people sweet, placid and a liiiittle bit hippy.Side Effects: Hallucinations; under excess, death due to failure of that part of the autonomous nervous system that controls breathing.Notes: There is a real-life muscle relaxant called carisoprodol which is also known as ‘Soma’. The intent of Huxley’s fictional drug is to keep the citizens of his imagined utopia in perfect and blissful equilibrium, though it leaves them little prepared for the intrusion of a ‘savage’ from the world beyond the city limits (this role was played by 2001 actor Keir Dullea in a widely criticised US TV mini-series in the early 1980s) The popular rumour about Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi project is that he will be taking on Huxley’s classic – presumably and inevitably with Russell Crowe as the noble savage. Actually, that sounds pretty good…