Named substances, alcohol, tobacco, altered perception, party chemistry, dependence, medical drugs and the places where intoxication becomes a formal device.
Murder, theft, fraud, scams, coercion, kidnapping, counterfeit money, organized crime, rumor and criminality as social infrastructure.
Criminal underworld, nightlife, infernal underworld, literal descent structures, basements, Hollywood-under-Hollywood and the places where those registers touch.
Pimps, sex work, gambling, drugs, counterfeit money, bootlegging, protection rackets, scams, insider knowledge and legality that keeps changing underneath the transaction.
L.E.P.D., Gerta Vollenweid, parody detectives, cops as threat/background, evidence, surveillance, courts and prison as both institution and metaphor.
The richest intersections: nightlife + drugs + violence; drug markets + legitimacy; blackout + missing memory; police + evidence; intoxication + criminal rumor.
The back room: a conservative term ledger with source links, ambiguity notes and false-friend controls.
The vocabulary is not peripheral
publications contain one of the deliberately conservative named drug / addiction tokens used for this audit (134 literal matches).
contain the conservative alcohol / tobacco vocabulary (216 literal matches).
contain at least one term from either conservative chemical set (350 literal matches).
contain one of the conservative crime tokens (278 matches).
contain one of the conservative vice / underworld tokens (83 matches).
contain one of the police / court / surveillance tokens (128 matches).
These are discovery footprints, not semantic totals. Common words with dangerous double meanings — high, speed, acid, coke, crack, joint, pot, dealer, mob, hooker, fence, racket — are intentionally excluded from these headline counts and handled in context below.
Three different questions
Drugs: what happens to perception, memory, appetite, sociability and the body? Crime: what happens when rule-breaking becomes livelihood, plot engine, social rumor, institutional practice or aesthetic vocabulary? Underworld: what happens when the work moves below respectable surfaces — into nightlife, vice markets, basements, criminal networks, Hell, or simply the part of the city polite description omits?