A couple of busy, bad nights at work and home...I will try to make a more in depth post tomorrow...
In the meantime:
The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert
This little novel was originally published in 1968, three years after the classic Dune. And it shares a couple of big ideas with that novel, though this one is set in current (1960's) day rural California. A researcher from U-Cal Berkeley named Gilbert Dasein travels to a very isolated community in rural California called Santaroga. He is being payed to do research there, but his real motive is to meet the girl from that community named Jenny, whom he once knew at college, and with whom he is deeply in love. Santaroga is a very independent place, where they produce their own food, where outside food and drink is not allowed in, outsiders are not allowed to buy homes there, and researchers seem to have a way of ending up dead. And anyone who leaves to join the military or go to college ends up going back.
It turns up that there is a naturally occurring substance that gets into the food that alters the body and mind, and is ridiculously addictive.
Like Dune, here Herbert explores the effects of a community wide addiction to a naturally occurring super drug...
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