The drugging of Blue Sector's water supply is well documented as part of 'The Great Alien Conspiracy', but it is an incident that merits greater scrutiny in itself.
It became clear after a surge in reported 'alien' sightings that something was severely amiss. This has since been proved to be the result of large amounts of hallucinogens added to the water supply, causing a variety of visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations throughout the entire population of Blue. This included the majority of the ship's engineers, whose work over those months was severely affected by the drugs.
Celebrity Engineering Twins Ferrous and Indium had this to say on the subject (from the documentary The Year Blue Lost It):
“Seriously, we were tripping balls. At one point, we even thought we were actually each other!”
In fact, it has been speculated that it was the widespread hallucinations in the Engineering department that allowed the overwrite of Toroid 5 to progress as far as it did. This is, of course, impossible to prove.
It was Victor White, using his Wily Aqueous Tracing Emergency Responder (WATER), who isolated the source of the hallucinogens. Having obtained details of the drug from Nemo Blue (who himself extracted it from the blood of Hephaestus Black, believed to be a pawn in the Children of Earth's Alien Conspiracy), it was fairly simple to devise a chemical that reacted to the presence of the drug (in fact it glowed green) and thus trace the source back to an Engineering Bay in Blue Sector.
Various filtration and distillation methods were attempted to remove the flow of hallucinogens and these produced short-term relief, but did not fully purify the water supply. It seemed that no matter what was tried, drugs were still getting into the water …
It finally fell to Indium Blue to work out how the drugs were finding their way into the water supply. Through analysing the security footage of the Engineering Bay in question, Indium found a section of footage had been taken out and replaced with clips from Samurai Vikings of the 21st Century. Through days of painstaking work, Indium was able to reconstruct the original security footage that showed several masked people breaking in and hacking the controls for the water supply and fabbers in Blue Sector. The footage provided little solid information as to their identities (though rumours that one figure was actually noted Alien Hunter and celebrated hero, Hephaestus Black, have been disproved due to height disparity).
Once the source of the drugs was determined, it was a simple (if time consuming) job for the hack-job to be removed and the systems to stop fabricating drugs directly into the water.
Pit Blue recounts the experience of being one of the few non-drugged people in Blue Sector at the time:
“It was bizarre. There were people everywhere totally freaking out! The ones who weren't hearing alien-bugs crawling through the walls seemed convinced the floor itself was eating them … or they were standing in the middle of the corridors swaying and listening to music only they could hear. I went to get my parents and make sure they were ok and, well, they thought I was a time traveller from the future who was there to rescue them from killer-alien-robots. It was like being in Rainbow, but more so!”
Various historians and psychologists have spent time documenting the many and varied fascinating hallucinations that were recorded at the time, but if you want to know what it was like then it's rumoured that all you have to do is go into Blackout and talk to Tiny Red and she'll sell you a sample (now in the new tasty and sweet green-flavour!). Apparently, before the problem was fixed, 'Six-Fingers' Jack (Blackout Entrepreneur) had taken samples, then synthesised and bottled it. The resulting drink was the first in a range of carbonated hallucinogens that took Blackout by storm shortly thereafter.