Whether licit or illicit, drugs are richly material-semiotic objects: this means that they carry both matter and meaning. Even as drugs are concrete objects with the capacity to reorder our bodies on a molecular level, that is never all that they do. For their consumers—and also for their makers, distributors, and even observers—the physiological impacts of drugs are inseparable from meaning making. The word _drug_ is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it refers to a substance with transformative physiological effects. The effects are typically divided into licit and illicit, as in the following: “(1) any natural or artificially made chemical that is used as a medicine” and “(2) any natural or artificially made chemical that is taken for pleasure, to improve someone’s performance of an activity, or because a person cannot stop using it” (_Cambridge English Dictionary_ 2022, “drug”). As a verb, the word means “to administer a drug,” although “to drug” is rarely used in a neutral way and usually has nefarious connotations. The most prominent licit sense of _drug_ is in the context of the pharmaceutical industry, as in _drug discovery_. The most prominent illicit sense of _drug_ is in the context of street-level...