Dust is a drug, smuggled from system to system in ways common to high-value/low-weight-and-bulk contraband. It trades at high prices and margins on the black markets, and is as hotly pursued by law enforcers in the way opiates are today. Implications are that if one is caught in possession or dealing, the penalties are quite harsh. Many black market operators refuse to deal dust because of the risks posed by law enforcement.
The effects of Dust seem to be a combination of LSD and cocaine, with the user experiencing some types of Psi powers for the duration of the effect of the drug. It is targeted at humans, but one episode follows G'Kar, a non-human Narn, who has tried it to get a taste of the Psi powers his race has lost. Babylon 5 physicians will suspect dust use if two persons have a unique, shared experience. For example, a dust user might complain of a mountain falling upon him while his victim is an avalanche survivor.
Dust is revealed to be a covert program of the Psi Corps. Officially it began as a way to locate latent telepaths, create telepaths out of mundanes, and perhaps to amplify the powers of known telepaths. No mention is made of the cash flow inherent in such a popular form of high value contraband that would flow to Psi Corps. Nonetheless the Dust project was generally seen as a failure, and even prominent Psi Corps members like Alfred Bester were vehemently opposed to its further development.
Read more about this topic: Psi Corps
Famous quotes containing the word dust:
“not that horror was not, not that the killings did not continue,
not that I thought there was to be no more despair,
but that as if transparent all disclosed
an otherness that was blessèd, that was bliss.
I saw Paradise in the dust of the street.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“Commerce has set the mark of selfishness,
The signet of its all-enslaving power,
Upon a shining ore, and called it gold:
Before whose image bow the vulgar great,
The vainly rich, the miserable proud,
The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings,
And with blind feelings reverence the power
That grinds them to the dust of misery.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)