Immune to Drugs

Drugs Are Bad, mmmkay?

Except when terrible addictions to horrible drugs are Played for Laughs, often using a character who is Immune to Drugs.

These characters should be long since dead due to the vast amount of drugs and/or alcohol they take, but since their wacky antics must go on they rarely suffer any serious or lasting medical problems from them, aside from being insane, and quickly recover from them. It's almost like a superpower in some cases.

Aside from the physical effects, the character will rarely encounter any financial difficulties in supporting their habit, except as a plot point, even if they have no apparent job or other source of wealth.

Sometimes used when the character in question is poisoned, in which they show no ill effects. Because it's funny. Often used in this manner to break the Drama or establish the character as Immune to Drugs.

There is also a second variety where characters from Sci-Fi and fantasy media are literally immune due to their race or some kind of Green Rocks. That overlaps with Never Gets Drunk.

Can easily become a Charles Atlas Superpower due to Rule of Funny

Examples of Immune to Drugs include:

First Kind

Comics

Spider Jerusalem from Transmetropolitan, though he gets a rather horrible neurological ailment that makes him even more unpredictable, and is eventually likely to turn him into a vegetable—but that is caused by the one "drug" that he didn't take voluntarily.
- Not to mention the fact that he lives in a future where you can change your species and smoking won't kill you as long as you take the appropriate medication. It should be relatively easy to repair any damage caused by drugs and alcohol.
- Even then, regenerative medicines don't reduce drug effects; his editor Royce recalls the one time he found Spider in a bathtub bound with healing tape and desperately trying to find a vein because all the other ones had collapsed.
On more than one occasion, Zippy the Pinhead inadvertently ingests a many-times-over-lethal amount of drugs, and though he may be wildly hallucinating, it's apparently no different than everyday life for him.
Sociopathic drug addict FBI agent Red Ketchup started taking drugs for the job. Then casually. Then to keep going. Then to keep his drug-fuelled metabolism from shutting down. By the time the sleazeball movie director boss of his sister tries to poison him with cyanide, he merely does a Heroic BSOD instead. An emergency room doctor is amazed at the content of his blood, which reads more like the description of Otto's urine below, with some trace amounts of actual blood.

Doctor: 10cc of this would kill an elephant.

- It's unsurprising poison would fail to kill a guy who starts the day with a gallon of Prestone the same way most people drink coffee. His metabolism could make Ozzy himself back down from a drinking contest.

Fan Works

My Immortal, the best... or worst fanfiction ever written. The characters drink and smoke and... nothing happens. Justified in Ebony's case, because she's a vampire.

Films -- Live-Action

In Thank You for Smoking, a group of anti-tobacco activists kidnap tobacco industry spokesperson Nick Naylor and attempt to kill him with a lethal dose of nicotine (by covering him from head to foot in nicotine patches). Later, his doctor tells him that he only survived because of his years of smoking, but if he ever smokes again, he could die because of the damage from the overdose.
One character in The Men Who Stare at Goats claims to have built up a tolerance to a number of narcotics. Considering how he acts when dosed with LSD (along with an entire military base) this may not be true, or that may just be how he acts all the time now...
According to the Other Wiki, "Withnail is shown drinking roughly nine and a half glasses of red wine, half a pint of cider, one shot of lighter fluid [emphasis added]..., two and a half shots of gin, six glasses of sherry, thirteen glasses of whisky and half a pint of ale" throughout the movie. And he also does pot. There's a supposed Drinking Game where the player drinks everything Withnail drinks when he drinks it, with something else substituted for the lighter fluid. It's unlikely that anyone who has even attempted the game has actually completed it.
Get Him to The Greek: Aldous Snow, as demonstrated especially by the infamous "Jeffrey" scene.
Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Literature

Case was rendered this after Armitage modified his body to be incapable of metabolizing certain drugs. in Neuromancer. He could take then, but they would pass right through.
If you try to drink along with any character in any work by Ernest Hemingway, you will die.
According to the medical report in Thunderball when James Bond is not engaged in strenuous duty, he consumes half a bottle of spirits between 60 and 70 proof a day. And he smokes 60 cigarettes a day (of a higher nicotine content than standard cigarettes).

Live-Action TV

Father Jack Hackett from Father Ted who is always drinking but never dies—even after drinking floor polish, toilet cleaner (once drank a bottle of Toilet Duck), and a whole bottle of illegal sleep medication. He is apparently only sober every twelve years.
- Subverted: "I suppose sobriety for Father Jack must be like taking some sort of mad hallucinogenic." Whilst sober he can't see properly with single-vision. Usually able to spot a Nun, he has to be told a Nun is standing right in front of him.
- Subverted again, when we discover one of the few things Jack can't stomach:

Fr. Ted: No, Father! Don't drink that it's--
(Jack takes a sip)
Fr. Jack: FECKIN' WATER!!

Karen from Will and Grace. She seems to border on Immune to Everything, as she's admitted to taking things that aren't designed for humans ("an eye dropper of cat tranquilizer") and who knows what else (I seem to recall her mentioning that she once took a random pill she found under her kitchen sink.)
Reverend Jim Ignatowski, on Taxi.
Gregory House pops way too many pills, mostly Vicodin. His colleagues, as doctors, are not terribly comfortable with this. He, as a doctor, even as a paragon of Dr. Jerk, isn't always comfortable with this.
During one episode of WKRP in Cincinnati, it's revealed that Johnny Fever has developed such a massive tolerance to alcohol, his reaction time actually improves with every drink he takes. (Fellow DJ Venus Flytrap, on the other hand, gets totally plastered.)
Bottom: Edward Elizabeth Hitler—a man who has only ever been drunk once. (17 years and counting.) Managed to get blind-drunk (even by his own standards) on £1.75 (a special offer on "Old Spice"), leading him to be unable to find the front door or the floor after falling over, finally finishing with a nightcap consisting of a bottle of bleach. He always carries a hip-flask which contains brandy, meths, Pernod, paint stripper, Mister Sheen, brake fluid and Drambuie.
Patsy Stone from Absolutely Fabulous. Although she's had her stomach pumped many times, she's never experienced long-term side effects. Along with her rampant drug and alcohol abuse, she is almost never seen without a cigarette. When she attempted to quit smoking, she apparently began recharging the multiple patches on her body!
Subverted by Charlie in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The hard-drinking, glue-sniffing loon scarfs down some home-made brownies that he himself spiked with downers, saying, "I can handle my sedatives." To the amazement of his friends, he's still standing hours later, but he's in a drugged-out fog, muttering gibberish. By the end of the episode, he's passed out and drooling.

Music

Murdoc of Gorillaz has been almost constantly drunk for several months, as of current canon, on top of all the drinking and drug-taking he did before this. 2D, meanwhile, is addicted to prescription painkillers. Neither of them seem to have suffered any permanent harm from their habits.

Pro Wrestling

André the Giant: "It usually takes two liters of vodka just to make me feel warm inside."
- Weighing somewhere between 475 and 540 pounds was almost certainly a factor.
While Jake "The Snake" Roberts isn't exactly in a good place in terms of health, finances or professional standing, the fact that he should, by rights, be dead by now might count.
Rob Van Dam. Despite being the most obvious space cadet in the wrestling business (and that's up against some very stiff competition), complete with periodic interviews with High Times magazine, he's still well regarded professionally, gets plenty of job offers and is a three time world champion.
Jeff Hardy. A total of four Wellness violations with WWE; a drug raid on his home produced a laundry list of narcotics, leading to his ongoing drug trial (including one charge of opium trafficking) and was the subject a humiliating on-screen feud with CM Punk over his drug habits. Still has legions of fans and gets loads of offers of work.
- A notable exception: Victory Road 2011. Turned up drugged as fuck, and got his ass kicked by Sting in under 90 seconds.

Tabletop Games

This trope is one of the reasons the Noise Marines in Warhammer 40,000 are so messed up, except replace "drugs" with "all sensation". After thousands of years in worship of the god/ess of decadence, they get to the stage where they need to invent new drugs and listen to concussive blasts of pressure to get their kicks.

Video Games

Joshua Graham in Fallout: New Vegas. His strange immunity to drugs has let his survive assassination attaempts, but his immunity comes to bite him every single day since he was burned on every inch of his body (and thrown off a cliff), and forced to strip and reapply his bandages every day for sanitary reasons, without any hope of painkillers or healing chems.
Deus Ex: Alcohol will heal you, although it will mess up your screen for a short period of time, and zyme, a rather addictive drug of the future, will just blur your screen as well. Possibly justified due to JC's augmentations. Cigarettes will harm you though. Averted in Deus Ex Invisible War however, in which alcohol will harm the character. In Human Revolution, alcohol will again health you (though with Regenerating Health it's mostly for temporarily's boosting health beyond the regular maximum) and make you drunk, and while they're not an item it's stated Adam's aug's basically cancel out any negative effects (he muses that he's not even capable of a little self-destruction anymore).
Godot in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations drinks up to 17 cups of coffee in court (and who knows how many more during the rest of the day) with no ill effects. It doesn't seem to be making him jittery or anything (rarely even scalded!). At one point, the judge admonishes him that he is going to ruin his health, but the situation is that his health is already ruined thanks to a deadly poison that didn't kill him, and since the coffee is his anti-drug?er, antidote?he apparently needs the coffee to keep him going the rest of his short remaining lifespan....
The members of Love Fist, the Fake Band from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, are implied to be Immune To Drugs: their favorite drink is a lethal Gargle Blaster, and they can drink "boomshine" without much problem.
- Just to explain how serious boomshine is, in a separate scene Tommy gets critically drunk from the fumes it gives off. At one point, a portion of Boomshine explodes violently enough to instagib a guy's entire arm. It makes jet fuel look like mineral water.
Cody from Final Fight: Streetwise is forcefully fed some drugs. There are some effects, but none of them are permanent. Actually, wait... there is a permanent condition. The drugs have healed his previously injured knees! Drugs are awesome! Of course, most fans will pretend FF:SW never happened.
The protagonist in System Shock 2 can use alcohol to regain health at the cost of psychic energy. Subverted in that smoking just drains your health with no benefit. Since psychic abilities aren't a requirement in any way (many perfectly viable character builds won't even touch them), downing bottles and BOTTLES and BOTTLES of hard alcohol not only won't even make your vision blurry, but can save you from death!
In Left 4 Dead and its sequel, you can take pain pills and adrenaline with no negative side effects.
In Saints Row 2, you can drink and smoke pot to an insane degree, but all it will do is make your screen go wobbly.
Alcohol in BioShock (series) allows Jack to regain health, and drinking a lot makes your vision blurry. So if you're low on health and find a lot of wine....
- It also reduces the level of available EVE you have...unless you have the appropriate gene tonic, in which case it produces extra EVE instead, meaning that with Boozehound you are well and truly this trope.
Drinking vodka in S.T.A.L.K.E.R will cure your radiation poisoning. It'll also make your screen sway a bit, but that passes after a few minutes.
Averted in Soulbringer, with ale and wine. Ale comes in mugs, and heals you...two or three hit points apiece. And lest you think you can stack these, around four or five mugs is when the vomiting (and health loss) starts. Thardolin red wine is even worse; probably because you chug the entire bottle, a single serving makes the screen wobble and your movement wonky (with no health gain), and a second will have you throwing up.
In Alpha Protocol, the arrest report for Konstantine Brayko (provided you left him alive) mentions he had enough cocaine in his system to, quote: "Make a baleen whale see Jesus". He shows absolutely no negative effects of this, and you can have the resident Heroic Comedic Sociopath spike his coke with rat poison and all it will do is make his drug-fuelled rampages slightly less imposing.

Web Animation

Subverted in this animation, where the winner of a year's supply of free beer drinks it all in only a week. He then learns that it was non-alcoholic beer he had been drinking all that time and promptly commits suicide.

Web Comics

Kingston from SSDD. At one point, during a Webcomic Time joke, he claims that a doctor told him that he's got "enough chemicals in his system to render most of China catatonic."
- Tessa and the other Super Soldiers supposedly have the second type; according to Lee it would take enough alcohol to poison an elephant for them to get drunk (though it might be a retcon, considering that Kerrie was shown drunk once before and Tessa supposedly got drunk and ordered Tin-head to disassemble her CO's car).
In Fans, a sedative dart fails to have any effect on hard-partying Perky Goth Alsin.
Ten Winds in Keychain of Creation. "I've drunk stronger stuff with my afternoon snack." Might be either type 1 or 2 depending on whether he used a Charm to resist the sedative.

Web Original

Possibly a Justified Trope for PPCers tend to go through Bleeproducts, alcohol, and painkillers at a fair rate and never suffer any longterm effects. Possibly Justified Trope in that they can draw on medical treatment from any continuum ever created, so the ill-effects could be mended if they start to become a problem. To quote one agent when told he shouldn't try marijuana, "If Dr Fitzgerald can sew limbs and genitals back on he can rebuild the inside of my lungs if necessary, and I fail to see what it could do to my brain that this job has not already done."
Michael Swaim from Agents of Cracked is stated to be "immune to pills," from taking too many of them at one point.

Western Animation

The Simpsons
- Barney. It's been lampshaded to hell and back, including several references to a failing liver (including a gag on "The Joy of Sect," in which Barney sees a discarded liver on the floor of an airport bar and thinks that his liver tried to escape--again), and no appearances in the "future" episodes.
- Krusty, by his own description, has become so jaded and world-weary that the only drug that affects him anymore is freebased ground-up moon rocks (and all that does is get him to normal).
- The real walking pharmacy on the show, though, is Otto. Aside from being a run-of-the-mill pot smoker, he's also shown in "Father Knows Worst" buying model kits and glue, then dumping the kits as soon as he's out of the store, he walked out of a kitchen cutlery store called "Stoner's Pot Palace" due to "flagrant false advertising," his urine is so full of traces of illegal drugs that it looks like a scene from Yellow Submarine. The "best" part in all of this: he drives the schoolbus!!
  - The episode where Otto loses his license and Skinner takes over driver duty quickly shows that in order to not go utterly insane, he needs to be high as a kite all the time!
- The full list of what was found in Otto's urine sample:

"Crack, smack, uppers, downers, outers, inners, horse tranquilizers, cow paralyzers, blue bombers, green goofers, yellow submarines, LSD Mach 3, and trace amounts of human urine."

Pickles on Metalocalypse, due to his frequent use of (all) drugs in the past, and having been on "government weed" since the age of six (for his "kiddie glaucoma"), is immune to "Totally Awesome Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake", the mind-destroying drug created to reprogram the minds of Pickles' old band, Snakes-n-Barrels, in a plan to use them to get to Dethklok.
- Doctor Rockso is powered by cocaine. C-C-C-C-COCAINE!!!

Real Life

Hunter S. Thompson.
- Here's a page from his personal journal, which lead to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas being published after sent it to his boss (who sent it to a publisher).

"The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls."

Keith Richards cannot be killed by conventional weapons. As Robin Williams said about him:

I know there's a cure for bio terrorism or whatever it is, and I know it lies within Keith Richards. He is the only man on the planet who can go "Anthrax? (snort) Alright! Doesn't go with my e-coli, but fuck..." Keith is the only man who can make the Osbornes look fucking Amish. He's insane! I've seen him go up to a drug dealer and the drug dealer's like, "I'm out man, I'm sorry; I have nothing left!" Supposedly, he goes to Switzerland and changes his blood...not one or two pints, but like a fucking Chevrolet--all of it. Now what I wanna know is who gets his blood? Some old Swiss man, going, "HEIDI! We gotta go on tour, you bitch! We gotta pay for Mick's babies!" I know we will all be dead and gone, but Keith will still be there with five cockroaches. He'll be going, "You know, I smoked your uncle, did ya know that? Fucking crazy..."

- According to Robin, Jack Nicholson has done every drug known to man and is the only one who will have Keith Richards say, "I have to go home now, Jack".
Lemmy Kilmister.
William S. Burroughs.
Slash.
John A. Macdonald.
Graham Chapman. According to the other Pythons, he would sit around during their writing sessions sipping what everyone thought at the time was a large glass of water. It was gin.
- According to the documentary Python, a significant part of the problem was that he acted exactly the same when drunk as he did when he was sober—so they couldn't tell the difference between when he was completely sloshed and when he was just doing Pythonesque things.
  - Either that or he was just drunk literally all the time.
  - Except during the making of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where he proved he was not Immune to Going Cold Turkey and suffered from withdrawal.
Ozzy Osbourne. Apparently now he's just on coffee, but at this point he probably doesn't need them anymore.
- According to his autobiography, when he went for a colonoscopy, he had to be given four times the regular doseage of sedative before he was knocked out. The doctor insisted that it wasn't possible and that Ozzy wasn't human.
- Ozzy's actually having his genome mapped, so scientists can figure out why he and others like him can survive what they do themselves. Really!
Charlie Sheen. Or so he claims.
- He has warlock tiger blood and adonis DNA. Those things overpower everything else, except the winning.
David Crosby.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote the following in A Man Without A Country:

...I am going to sue the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty-two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the planet were named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Second Kind

Anime & Manga

In Ah! My Goddess, Belldandy packs away shot after shot of liquor without even getting tipsy, but drinking a single can of ordinary soda gets her plastered. Her sister Urd can only get drunk on sake.
Lum and other Oni characters from Urusei Yatsura are immune to alcohol (and probably most poisons too, as seen with some badly-prepared fugu in a manga story arc) thanks to their alien metabolism. However, eating plums will make them drunk.
Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo! is immune to all forms of toxins, including alcohol. She can shut this immunity off if she wants to get drunk (which is a common occurrence), but doing so requires a sustained conscious effort. Which means that if she gets too drunk to maintain her concentration on suppressing the immunity, she'll instantly sober up again.