Focus Features

The drug melange is the single most important substance in a galaxy-spanning post-Earth civilization. Sure, author Frank Herbert saw melange as a metaphor for Middle Eastern oil dependence, but the visions melange gives Paul Atreides, leading him to become a mystical superman, contradict all the criticism and makes melange the sexiest drug in history. I’d take it in a hot second.

Identical twin gynecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle, are really two halves of one personality. Neither can exist without the other and this drives both a little mad. Drugs fuel their madness and, being doctors, their journey to inner space doesn’t end with tie-dyed hippie satori, but with surgical self-exploration that’s both horrifying and tragically touching.

Otto Preminger’s hyperbolic, old school melodrama about drugs was made back when heroin was as alien as moon rocks to middle class America. Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine (one of the coolest character names in history) with all the desperation of Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man. Nelson Algren’s screenplay smells of sweat, dirty rooms and burning spoons.

Cocaine and the violent and sexual excesses associated with it becomes something much larger in David Lynch’s vision. He uses coke as one part of a brutal ritual that opens the door to a world of dark and sinister mystical experience. Killer Bob, the central bad guy, is both the shaman and the devil who reveals dark truths lurking behind the doors of suburban America.

One of the best drug films has no drugs in it at all. A lot has been written about Sherlock Holmes’s cocaine addiction and Basil Rathbone as Holmes plays it straight until the film’s famous last line after the mystery is solved, "Oh, Watson -- the needle!" It’s great observation on how the creative mind can get lost after the creative moment is over.