Alcohol and drugs play a key role in The Savage Detectives. For Belano and Lima, marijuana is more than just a narcotic. It is a means of making money in a society from which they feel alienated. They sell marijuana as a way to fund their literary magazine, Lee Harvey Oswald, embracing the countercultural valence of their poetic rejection of mainstream society. In effect, the decision—or even the active urge—to use illegal means to fund a poetry magazine is an artistic comment on the magazine’s relation to the society itself. By funding a magazine through the sales of narcotics (rather than using narcotics to enrich themselves), Lima and Belano are presenting themselves as principled rebels against an oppressive status quo, both in terms of the society itself and the literary circles in Mexico. They feel alienated from both, so they decide to fund their own literary enterprises through means that the society itself has deemed illegal. They chart their alienation through their financial relationship to society and literature, presenting themselves as determined and willing outsiders. At the same time, however, this principled stand is rejected by some characters. In Part 2, numerous voices put forward the idea that Belano and Lima were just selling drugs rather than getting real jobs. Both realities can exist at once, in line with the novel’s attitude toward subjective reality. Belano, Lima, Lee Harvey Oswald, and marijuana thus exist as a concurrent symbolic representation of the novel’s belief in the inherent subjectivity of artistic ideas and reality, as well as the broader sense of alienation which is expressed throughout the novel.

While marijuana and other narcotics are deemed illegal, alcohol is everywhere. García Madero meets the visceral realists in a bar, then charts his sudden move toward their bohemian lifestyle through his growing consumption of alcohol. Similarly, Amadeo Salvatierra’s memories of Lima and Belano are inseparable from his constant consumption of alcohol. First, he tells the audience, he plied them with a type of mezcal which is no longer available. Keen to keep them interested in his stories, he sent them to the store to buy tequila. He feels increasingly drunk, not only as a result of the alcohol but also from the nostalgic sense of self-importance which is granted to him by the visceral realists’ interest in his past. In this way, alcohol becomes a symbol of the intoxicating nature of human relation and the need for these people—as atomized as they are—to feel something. Alcohol crumbles the social boundaries which exist between the characters and allows them to move closer to a kind of individual self-realization which, in the case of both García Madero and Amadeo, ends on a pessimistic note. Alcohol does not provide the answers, but its intoxicating effects help to delineate the boundaries which exist between the characters.

Toward the end of Part 2, the part of the novel which looks furthest into the chronological future, narcotics are associated with tragedy. Luis Sebastián Rosado describes with regret how Luscious Skin is killed in a narcotics raid, with his identity only being revealed by a name written on a scrap of paper found in his pocket. This ignominious end to one of the most beguiling and mysterious visceral realists hints at the tragic conclusion of Luscious Skin’s poetic interests. Similarly, various accounts of Lima’s fate paint him as a tragic figure, suggesting that he became an unrecognizable with a drug addiction after his return to Mexico City. Lima became unrecognizable to the various characters in a way that mirrors the extent to which Mexico City (and Mexico itself) had become unrecognizable to Lima. Drugs helped him to numb the pain of his alienation and his experiences, allowing him to vanish into the mythical past which he helped to establish in his youth. This association with tragic ends represents the extent to which narcotics are not the sole addiction of these characters. They had an addiction to a certain kind of life, to an ideal, to a kind of expression. They spent their lives chasing after the high of their youth and, unable to find it, developed an addiction to narcotics. This tension between artistry and addiction represents the perilous nature of the poetic journey.