We’ve sat with Han Solo and Chewbacca in a divey Mos Eisley cantina. It may be a galaxy far away, but its residents share with us the same profound need to separate ourselves from ourselves. People in the Star Wars galaxy get fucked up. Like here, they probably love getting fucked up.
But then, on April 25, 2014, something changed. Millions of voices cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced, as Lucasfilm announced that the Star Wars Expanded Universe would now be reduced to Star Wars Legends, de-canonizing a vast world of novels, video games and comic books, reducing its characters from mere unreality to a fiction’s fiction. In the process, they threw out the entire bar and multiple planetary drug markets.
Once there was so much to drink. Mandallian narcolethe. Orryxian catsblood. Fizzbrew. Ottegan mead. Mummergy. Noonian fixers, Arboite twisters, Ondaran willek juice and membrosia.
Toasts across the galaxy spilled Arkanian sweet milk, bloodsour, Cassandran choholl, claing juice, l’lahsh and pink lizard thunderbolt.
As far as we know, there is no more Alderaan beer, which Han Solo now enjoys strictly in a non-canonical context (we’ve taken dragonjuice from him too!). Dressellian, Gamorrean, Fozbeer, Kashyyykan bitter berry, Phibian, Potwa, Ryll, Shtoohb and Thuris stout breweries have all shuttered their doors (doors that no longer exist).
Corellian brandy, which appeared in the recent Star Wars novel, Bloodline, is our best evidence that the mind-altering capacity of the Star Wars galaxy has been impoverished and reduced to a sad cartel. So much of what’s left has the Corellian prefix. There’s Corellian ale, merlot and whiskey. As our own world diversifies, the shelves of the Star Wars liquor store look more and more barren. The selection's shrunk to Corellian swill, the teeming ecosystem of galactic distilleries lost forever.
The same panoply of choice has been erased for other liquor categories, including gin, brandy, whiskey and liqueur. Even Skywalker wine, added to the canon because of a conversational aside by George Lucas (emphasizing the galactic commonality of the Skywalker surname), no longer exists.
And drugs, oh, the delightful drugs we’ve lost.
Bounty hunters would snort pol pollen — the addictive galactic cocaine at first a means, but soon an ends.
Grey gabaki, with a high so relaxing and mild merchants would pump it through their air systems, no longer soothes whatever galactic glaucoma erupts from extraterrestrial DNA.
Ambrian cheroot — an indica-heavy, pink-smoke drug with more deleterious health effects than our galaxy’s cannabis — is gone, along with whatever the hell Jabba the Hutt was hitting out of his bubbling, green joonga pipe (marcan herbs, non-canonical sources say). With thousands of planets, marijuana varietals must flourish in the Star Wars galaxy, yet we have no more rekka, savorium herb, slick, Rokna blue, pryodene, a vrassa or Algarine torve weed to smoke.
Those who want to trip balls in the Star Wars galaxy will find their options even more drastically curtailed. There's no more banthazolate, Thyssel bark, luna-weed, fantazi mushrooms, dreamdust, or the unnamed luminous flowers that made ecorbs (a species that may not exist now!) dream of bloody teeth.
The fractured galaxy, where the real became unreal with a snap of corporate fingers, even stripped some of our favorite characters of their drug of choice. Lando Calrissian was fond of Dilnlexan cigars and the more generic cigarras, but they’re now non-canonical, as are the cigarette-like Carababba tabac.
Instead all we get are deathsticks, with the anti-drug propaganda built right into the name. Drugs in the Star Wars galaxy are now strictly the refuge of scum and villains, evidence of immorality and dissolution. In Star Wars: The Clone Wars, villains and losers smoke rankweed. The fun stuff is gone, but Spice, the galactic crystal meth, still exists.
Star Wars has become a cautionary tale. Gone are the head-freak days of Jedi munching down psychedelics and tripping about the woods. No more are our heroes smokers and tokers, as human in their alienness as we are in our sordid selves.
Sure, the cantina will never be completely dry. There’s still Ebla beer, lum, boga noga and phattro. Pilkey is still brewing his “special batch” aboard the Death Star. But how likely is the new canon, with its laser focus, to wallow once more in chemical bliss?
What will Kashyyk be without its garrmorl and grakkyn? And the aristocrats of Coruscant, how will they get by without their cherished pludris and polanis red?
Finn and Rey will never know the drunk we knew. Poe Dameron will never black out on Gruvian tovash. The heroes of Star Wars: Episode 8 will never get stoned or experience drug-induced ego death. They have no space salvia to smoke. No matter how much the Force awakens, it will never awaken and bake’n.
Those days are past. The hangover has arrived.
Sigh! To share one more glass of darkoma with Lando, as Lobot looks on in disapproval! I’d trade my ship for a snifter of golden-red ksaa! Oh, for a last sip of that ol’ Mantellian fungolager!
