In the overcrowded world & cramped space colonies of the late twenty-first century tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip he brings with him a new drug Chew-Z which is far more potent than Can-D But could the permanent state of drugged illusion it induces be part of something much more sinister?