Bayer once sold heroin as a cough suppressant for children. That’s not a trick question or an exaggeration. From 1898 to 1910, you could buy it over the counter, and the brand name “Heroin” was a Bayer trademark. The company marketed it as a safe, non-addictive alternative to morphine. I’ve opened trivia nights with that fact and watched entire tables go quiet before someone says “no way” and reaches for their phone. That tension between what we assume about drugs and what actually happened is where the best drug trivia lives.
The person searching for drug trivia already knows the basics. They know penicillin’s origin story, they can probably name a few Schedule I substances, and they’ve heard the one about Coca-Cola and cocaine. What they don’t know is how often they’re confidently wrong about the details. These 30 questions are built for that moment.
1. What common over-the-counter painkiller was originally derived from willow bark?
This is your warm-up. I put it first because everyone should get at least one right before the floor starts shifting. The active compound, salicin, was used for centuries before Bayer synthesized it into something your stomach could handle.
2. What was the first antibiotic ever discovered?
Nearly everyone says penicillin. And nearly everyone is right. But I’ve had confident players shout “sulfonamide” because they remembered that sulfa drugs were used first in clinical practice. The question says discovered, not used clinically. Alexander Fleming’s messy lab habits changed everything in 1928.
3. Viagra was originally developed to treat what condition?
This one gets laughs every single time. The drug failed at its intended purpose but succeeded spectacularly at something the researchers hadn’t planned for. Clinical trial participants were notably reluctant to return their unused pills.
4. What Schedule I drug did the CIA experiment with as a potential mind-control agent during Project MKUltra?
The declassified documents are wilder than any conspiracy theory. They dosed unwitting subjects, including their own agents, and at least one death is directly linked to the program. The Church Committee hearings in 1975 blew it open.
5. What’s the most widely consumed psychoactive substance on Earth?
People overthink this one. They start running through alcohol, nicotine, cannabis. But the answer is sitting in their hand half the time I ask it.
6. What plant is morphine derived from?
Straightforward, but it sets up harder questions later. The opium poppy has shaped more history than most world leaders.
7. Thalidomide, the drug that caused thousands of birth defects in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was originally marketed as what type of medication?
The thalidomide disaster is the reason the FDA has the power it does today. One FDA reviewer, Frances Oldham Kelsey, refused to approve it for the U.S. market despite enormous pressure. She probably prevented tens of thousands of cases.
8. What drug, synthesized in 1912 by Merck, didn’t become a popular recreational substance until the 1980s?
Merck patented it as a potential appetite suppressant and then basically forgot about it. Seventy years of sitting on a shelf before it found its audience in Dallas nightclubs.
9. What is the brand name of the opioid painkiller that Purdue Pharma aggressively marketed starting in 1996, contributing to the opioid epidemic?
I’ve asked this at events and the room gets noticeably heavier. Almost everyone knows someone affected. The marketing campaign claimed less than 1% addiction risk. That number was a lie.
10. What recreational drug is also known as “angel dust”?
This one splits generationally. People over 40 get it instantly. Younger players sometimes guess ketamine, which is in the same pharmacological family but isn’t the right answer.
11. What naturally occurring substance, found in certain species of mushrooms, is the active psychedelic compound being studied for treatment-resistant depression?
The FDA granted it “breakthrough therapy” designation in 2018. The phrase “magic mushrooms” undersells what’s happening in clinical research right now.
12. What does “NSAID” stand for?
Doctors say this acronym so casually that most patients never think to ask. I’ve watched nurses get tripped up on this one because they use the abbreviation fifty times a day without spelling it out.
13. Before it was banned, cocaine was a key ingredient in what famous soft drink?
Yes, the obvious answer. But here’s what most people don’t know: the coca leaf extract wasn’t fully removed from the formula until around 1929. And the company still uses a decocainized coca leaf extract for flavoring to this day.
14. What Swiss chemist accidentally discovered LSD’s psychoactive properties in 1943 and famously rode his bicycle home during the first intentional acid trip?
April 19, 1943. It’s still celebrated as “Bicycle Day.” He took what he thought was a small dose. It was not a small dose.
15. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 was the first major U.S. federal drug legislation. Which two drugs did it primarily regulate?
Before 1914, you could order heroin through the Sears catalog. I’m not joking. This law didn’t outright ban anything. It just required registration and taxation. But it fundamentally changed who could access what.
16. What war saw widespread military use of amphetamines by soldiers on both sides?
People guess Vietnam because of the cultural association. But amphetamine use was far more systematic and widespread in an earlier conflict. The German military distributed millions of methamphetamine tablets under the brand name Pervitin.
17. What country was the first in the world to decriminalize the personal use of all drugs, in 2001?
This one generates arguments. People guess the Netherlands almost every time. The actual answer surprises them, and the results surprise them even more. Drug-related deaths dropped, HIV infections among users plummeted, and overall usage rates didn’t spike.
18. What opioid, roughly 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, has become the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States?
The potency comparison is what gets people. A lethal dose can fit on the tip of a pencil. First responders now carry naloxone specifically because of how fast this drug works.
19. In “Breaking Bad,” what is the street name for the blue methamphetamine that Walter White produces?
The show’s prop department used blue rock candy. After the series aired, actual dealers started adding blue dye to their product as a marketing gimmick. Fiction reshaping reality in the worst possible way.
20. What drug is Jordan Belfort shown abusing throughout “The Wolf of Wall Street,” portrayed by the small white pills he takes in nearly every scene?
Leonardo DiCaprio’s physical comedy in that film is largely built around the effects of this drug. The “cerebral palsy phase” scene at the country club is one of the most accurate depictions of a specific kind of impairment I’ve seen in a major film.
21. What Beatles song was widely believed to be about LSD because of its initials, despite John Lennon insisting it was inspired by his son’s drawing?
Lennon maintained until his death that his son Julian came home with a painting of a classmate named Lucy. The BBC banned it anyway. Whether you believe him probably says more about you than about him.
22. What is the name of the fictional drug in the movie “Limitless” (2011) that allows Bradley Cooper’s character to use 100% of his brain?
The “we only use 10% of our brains” myth does a lot of heavy lifting in Hollywood. It’s completely false, but it makes for a great premise.
23. What common anesthetic, used in both human and veterinary medicine, has recently gained attention as a rapid-acting treatment for severe depression?
The FDA approved a nasal spray version in 2019. For people who’ve tried everything else, a single dose can produce results within hours. Traditional antidepressants take weeks.
24. What does the “D” in “D.A.R.E.” stand for?
Millions of American kids wore the T-shirt. Fewer can spell out the acronym. And the program’s own studies eventually showed it didn’t significantly reduce drug use. It might have actually increased curiosity in some populations.
25. Naloxone, sold under the brand name Narcan, reverses opioid overdoses by doing what at the receptor level?
This is the question that separates people who watch medical dramas from people who’ve had actual pharmacology training. The mechanism is elegant and brutal at the same time. It doesn’t just block the opioid. It competes for the same parking spot and wins.
26. What toxic plant, associated with witchcraft in medieval Europe, contains the tropane alkaloids atropine and scopolamine?
The “flying ointment” theory suggests that medieval “witches” applied preparations of this plant to their skin, producing vivid hallucinations of flight. The delivery method involved a staff or broomstick. Yes, that’s where some historians think the broomstick imagery comes from.
27. What is the most prescribed drug in the United States by number of prescriptions?
It’s not an opioid, not an antidepressant, not a statin. It’s something far more mundane, and that mundanity is exactly why people get it wrong. They think dramatic. The answer is boring and everywhere.
28. What U.S. president declared a “War on Drugs” in 1971, calling drug abuse “public enemy number one”?
A Nixon domestic policy adviser later admitted on the record that the war on drugs was designed to target two specific groups: antiwar protesters and Black Americans. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.” That quote from John Ehrlichman was published in Harper’s in 2016.
29. Heroin was originally trademarked as a brand name by what pharmaceutical company?
We opened with this fact, and now it’s a question. I’ve found that when people hear something wild at the start of a night, they still second-guess themselves when it shows up as a question later. The brand name came from the German word “heroisch,” meaning heroic, because of how it made patients feel.
30. What Schedule I substance, illegal in the United States since 1970, was legally used by thousands of therapists in the 1950s and 1960s to treat alcoholism, with a success rate that some studies put above 50%?
This is the question I close with because the answer forces a reckoning. Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, tried it in the 1950s and called it one of the most profound experiences of his life. He actively campaigned for its therapeutic use. The man who built the world’s largest sobriety organization believed this substance could help people get sober. And then the Controlled Substances Act made it impossible to study for decades. We’re only now circling back to where the science was 60 years ago. That gap between what we banned and what we lost is the kind of thing that stays with you after the trivia is over.
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