Hug Dealers

I wanted to go through the process of how one little spark can grow into a full concept.

There is a classic piece of propaganda, "Hugs are better than drugs."  It's pretty laughable and ineffective.  It's also pretty ironic how many people are way more uncomfortable with physical contact than with drug use.  The standard reaction is to ignore or ridicule it.  But let's take it seriously for a second.  In fact, let's take it super seriously.  If hugs are better than drugs, then whatever exists currently with relation to drugs would also exist when it came to hugs.

We would have hug dealers.  But it wouldn't stop there.  We would have hug users.  People would die from hug overdose (maybe they got the life squeezed out of them?). We would have hug rehab, where people would go through hug withdrawal and try not to have a hug relapse.

In dark corners, people would pay money to their local hug dealers just to get one more fix, to cure the pains of the day.  They are never too much at peace though, since they are always looking over their shoulders, afraid of being caught.  People waste their entire lives just to get their next hug.  They rob, steal, kill, hustle, just to get the money for their next fix.

This is becoming an increasingly ridiculous story, but one that has potential.  Create a whole world of these hideous hugs.  Tell the stories of the people that have to live these lives, users and dealers.  Tell the stories of the people who have to put up with these, like victims and police enforcers.

Also, since hugging is physical contact, but is being sold and sought by others, this could be seen as a world paralleling prostitution just as well as it does drugs.  In any case, it becomes the kind of thing that people eventually ask, how the heck did you come up with that idea?  The answer is that it was one random observation and one random thought from it that branched out and became its own.