The eastern district was famous for three main things.
First of all, its large presence of soldiers and their families, giving it the colloquial na- Soldier's district.
Second was its large, permanent slave market situated near the gates. It was said a thousand slaves were sold every day there, which was roughly 0.5% of the city's total population.
Third was its various legal and illegal pleasure centers.
And it was this last section that Alexander decided to focus on first.
The legal establishnts consisted of so of the biggest and best restaurants in the city serving all sorts of regional and foreign delicacies, a large number of hotels, inns, and bars serving various types of alcohol and spirits, a few registered red light houses catering to n and so to even wealthy won, so gambling houses where dice and a ga similar to darts was played, and a handful of smoking bars, where cannabis, opium, and an extrely bitter leaf similar to betel leaf was served.
Of course in reality, many elents of the four establishnts were shed together to provide an all in one service- such as restaurants doubling as inns for the night, serving good quality alcohol, smoke up opportunities, and even companionship for the night.
Thus as Alexander walked across the orange hued streets late afternoon, he noticed large stacks of smoke coming out from many of the restaurants and inns, where n ate, drank, and smoked together with friends and family in many small, roadside stools and benches.
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Cannabis and opium were legal in Adhania, widely used as pain dication and to cure insomnia, while that bitter leaf- called 'Tefnia', helped sore throats and was thought to keep the body healthy.
And Alexander had no problem with the last one- Tefnia. He even occasionally nibbled on the stuff, although the taste was quite the acquired one.
As for the other two, looking at the people who had just gotten off work and were filling their lungs with stacks of this steamy opioid, Alexander mumbled,
"I will have to find a way to ban them! The harm they do to the lungs is irreversible. The good news is most of the nobles are on my side. They hardly touch the stuff."
"They are aware of their highly addictive properties. And the Ramuh faith forbids such indulgence. So the only problem is how to wean the people using it off it."
Despite how politically fertile the soil was for Alexander to outright ban the stuff, he was well aware of how difficult it was to enforce a ban on drugs.
The addictive nature of it made simply cutting off the supply would hardly ever have the large intended effect.
People needed to be slowly taken off it.
It was of course not impossible- just look at how the Chinese stomped out opium use into oblivion even after using it for a century.
But this was quite hard.
One needed to take draconian asures- and if you could not, well you got sothing like the US's war on drugs.
Alexander thought that the country's insistence on eliminating this vice and the way it tried to do it was a great study on what to do and what not to do.
From the way Alexander saw it, the US governnt was set up with such checks and balances that it is constitutionally unable to take certain asures to stop this epidemic, such as adequately punishing the users of these drugs just as they to the suppliers, leading it to its long and drawn out war with on end in sight.
The core problem with their approach is that one cannot expect to stop supply and hope the demand will vanish. People wanting their fix will always find a dealer, and dealers will always exist whenever there is money to be made.
So to stop a drug epidemic, it has to be the other way around- if demand is curbed, supply will naturally dwindle.
Such as you cannot find typewriters anymore because there is no demand for typewriters. But you could not do it the other way around.
Now, it was not like the country's policymakers were not aware of this simple equation. They were very well aware and beyond.
It was just that politically implenting any of the aning strategic changes was difficult, to say the least.
Banning them outright would antagonize a significant amount of their voters who used and supported their continued use, while outright legalizing the uses and trying a Nordic country style would offend the other, fiercely 'anti drug' half.
So the country was stuck in this limbo, playing this ga of whack a mole, where they occasionally smashed one drug ring and showed off its decapitated carcass of the people as a sign of progress, while in the background, the surviving remnants of that ring splinter off to form three new rings and soon, business was back as usual.
And if you thought about it, this twisted ending made everyone happy- the users got their products, the anti drug crowd got a few n in prison, and the politicians got votes from both parties.
'I love democracy, I love the Republic'– Emperor Palpatine.
….
Now to be fair, the problem Alexander was facing was hardly as complex as the above example.
However the core problem of squashing demand while cutting off supply still remained.
People here lived hard lives, working their bones out from dawn to dusk. And after a hard day's work, they needed this.
Those smoky, hot puffs were like the refreshing fuel of sanity and tranquility they needed to be able to power through all the abject misery, poverty, and tragedies swimming around them without losing their minds.
'I guess the people here have much more to worry about than dying off old age. I will have to give them a better alternative before starting to ban them. It's too bad this part of the world has no tea or coffee.' Alexander lampooned, before making multiple notes in his head,
'I will ask Vidiyan about them when I et him in the next few days. Perhaps he will have so clues. And if he does not, I will build a few large ships using cent and have them sail east or west. Much of the world still remains unknown.'
'But all that will take so ti. For now, I will try to raise so awareness. The temples should be a good place to start. The priests can add this to their weekly sermons, claiming the drugs are from the loins of the devil and that is why the nobles, the god's chosen do not indulge in them.'
'As for a substitute, should I also start to invent fizzy drinks? I think I already have the technology. The actual drink is just sugar and water with so flavors and thickeners. Various saps of trees can work as the last two.'
'As for the fizzy part, well I can get carbon dioxide from burning listone. I already to that for the blast furnace. So I can simply channel the released gases into a large, sealed barrel of water, and once enough gas builds up, the pressure will naturally increase, dissolving the gas into the aqueous solution with no problem!'
'Yes, the theory has no major glaring flaws. I will just have to work out the details and see if it works.'
'And even if it does not work out, I think I can create a sowhat air tight steel cylinder using rubber and putty, and then pump the stored carbon dioxide directly into fizzy bottles. I already have the air pump I made for football.'
A thousand and more such thoughts and flashes illuminated Alexander's mind as he chanically made his way through the wide streets, hardly paying attention to the late noon bustle.
That was until he began to dive deeper and deeper into the city's bowels, where the line between legal and illegal establishnts began to soon blur.
Here, the inns served substandard food, especially at, and fish of unknown origins.
Which was saying sothing given even reputable restaurants had a habit of mixing unspeakable cuts into their beef, mutton, or pork stew.
For them, this would an sub studard cuts, at that had gone off a bit, parts from the guts and intestines which were considered very low quality, and even at from other much cheaper animals.
And it did not take a genius to guess which small animal or even insect would be considered cheap.
This was one of the reasons Alexander never ate at any restaurants or inns if he could help it.
And even if he was forced, he would only have freshly baked bread and vegetables. It was much harder to fake those, and frankly, they were cheap enough to not be worth the hassle for the seller.
Now, if this was the standard for reputable hotels, one would only guess how bad things were in the back alleys.
Looking at the water piece prices of so of the skewers and at pies being sold there, Alexander even highly doubted if there was even actual 'at' in there.
And when he asked a stall owner what he was selling, the man replied with a shaless grin,
"Chicken, beef, mutation, pork, venison and lamb! All straight from the city lord's manor. Only 1 ropal a skewer."
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