Alcoholism as Tyranny
The historical area of Russia through the Tsar, the USSR and the modern mafia used one substance to kill any source of resistance: vodka.
Huxley had a point when he talked about a chemical tyranny of drugs keeping people mellow and obedient. Orwell missed a trick there.
The best example of this being, going back 100s of years is Russia and vodka. This sounds almost cliched, however the only time the Moscow government went against vodka was in the 1980s under Gorbachev and it resulted in sober pushback against the regime.
Russia has a systematic problem with alcoholism. For centuries that society has been addicted to vodka. It does not help that the leadership of that country tends to see vodka as a great revenue stream. Addiction is an ugly thing. It is intergenerational and destroys all hope within a society. That encourages even more use of the substance! This in turn is used by the sellers to rake in more money. It uses misery as an economic commodity.
Along with the state taking back some of the money, zoned out people either on drugs in the USA or on alcohol in the USSR, do not get angry about their conditions. The substances also eliminate any long term planing and thinking, pushing people to only care about the now.