"Yeah, a fad here, a twist there," said the Asian guy, "a brief delay in shipping to some hard-hit famine site, or a celebrity scandal to chase off news coverage of some lethal outbreak ... The current muddled semilegal situation with drugs, for instance, that was a work of genius.... A great source of finance for anybody’s underground, and the people who shoot up heroin are extremely reckless and credulous. Street drugs will almost never be tested for additives, as long as they supply the thrill. There are narco-contraceptives—one shot makes a woman permanently allergic to the lining of her own uterus, something the woman would never notice, except that a fertilized egg will never adhere to her womb." He nodded sagely. "That works very well with mass inoculations too, if you can manage to contaminate the vaccines.... I suppose you could argue the technique’s rather sexist, but we’ve tried covert sterilization with men, and statistics prove that the cohort of fertile women is the real crux of population expansion; it’s all in the womb, that’s just the way human reproduction works.... People willing to take intravenous drugs are already flirting with suicide; there’s no real harm in assisting them."