8 Things Movies Always Get Wrong About Drugs

3. All Drugs Make You Hallucinate

A really good shorthand for "this guy is really f*cked up" in Hollywood, is to have them hallucinate wildly, regardless of what they have taken. The thing is that not all drugs are hallucinogens, and even the ones that are don't always produce epic visions complete with plot and scenery. It's more likely that you'll spend most of your night staring at the ground because the grass looks a bit trippy.

Anyway, one drug that isn't a hallucinogen is meth, rendering that scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse hallucinates a pair of murderous bikers a work of fiction in itself.

Meth is a stimulant, so it'll keep you up for days. At this point you might begin to hallucinate, but it'll be the sleep deprivation, not the meth, that does it to you as your brain slowly loses the ability to tell reality from imaginary. You'd get similar results with enough Red Bull (although this is definitely not advisable).

So, regardless of what you see on screen, if someone is hallucinating on something like meth, they've probably also taken a big old hit of Plot Device too.