Reprise: The Band - Savage Worlds and drugs

I handled hard drugs in my cyberpunkish game that way, that they would give you bonuses, but once you were on them, forced to buy certain drug-related edges, and skills like Knowledge (Drug scene) when you were leveling up. Somewhat like a drug skill/edge path...
The edges had mainly negative effects, so players really tried to get rid of their addiction as they could not get any positive character development while on it. But going turkey was not easy either...

I looked through my old notes.
Actually it was even simpler than I remembered.

There was this drug that gave you +2 on songwriting (it was a campaign about the PCs having a band in a postapocalyptic city), but as long as you were on it, you had to raise your Knowledge (Drugs) skill every time you leveled up, as this was the main thing on your mind: where to get the drug, when, and from whom...
So people became real pros with the whole drug trade and had to give up other character development. For people with high Smarts it was a little bit better, as they were longer able to raise at least another skill too.
Obviously everyone wanted to kick their drug habit quite early, which could be achieved by a Spirit test, you could try once a week.
But if someone offered you the drug later on, you still needed to pass a Spirit test not to fall back into your old habit. Especially nasty, when you would soon get your next possibilty to level up...

I was inspired by reading "Please kill me", the book on the 70ies NYC punk scene. :-D

As none of my players' characters had the skill before taking the drug or wanted to raise it by him-/herself, I simply ruled that at Knowledge(Drugs) d8, your skin would turn greenish, even greener on d10 and d12, and at Knowledge(Drugs) d12+1 you would be able to buy the edge "Complete Memory" and remember the time before the Orange War (don't ask..).Obviously you could streamline this basic system and make it more elegant, with real paths for different drugs.