headshot wrote: ↑Tue Jan 26, 2021 11:29 amThere's one episode (Symbiosis) where a population is convinced that they'll die if they don't receive life saving medicines supplied exclusively by a neighbouring planet, but it turns out the neighbouring planet has in fact hooked the users on a highly addictive drug with terrible withdrawal symptoms. Picard sorts it all out...by doing nothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiosis ... eneration)
Lol, they really recycle their plots. That's identical to the original series episode "Facebookia", where one planet gets all its neighbouring planets addicted to a drug. Spock points out that it's illogical to let the other planets destroy themselves through this addiction but nobody listens. The planets prefer to destroy themselves rather than give up the Facebookia drug and Kirk has a fist fight with an armadillo.
There's also that Voyager episode, Brexica, where one planet supplies medicine to the others in the solar system but demands rights to harvest all the system's spacefish in return. Janeway points out that having the right to the spacefish doesn't help them because they want to sell to the other planets, and the other planets won't buy because of being blackmailed over the medicine. Tuvok tells them spacefish are going extinct anyway due to over-harvesting, Chakotay goes on a vision quest and Seven of Nine ends up with a ridiculous body shape after a transporter accident.