the underground market: more pernicious than narcotics
There was still the prospect of an underground market exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD. The electrode-and-lever technology looked expensive at the time, but it was easy to foresee enormous widespread demand bringing it down to where electrodes’d be no more exotic than syringes.
Context
The narcotics-market seam the pickup mandate names: the p-terminal projected forward into the economy addiction already runs on. The forecast is that the pleasure-electrode would become a black-market drug "exponentially more pernicious than narcotics or LSD," the hardware commoditized until "electrodes'd be no more exotic than syringes" — addiction industrialized, the lever a mass consumer good. The nightmare vision of "millions of average nonabnormal North Americans... never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers" is the theme's projection of the substance-cage as a whole society's default state, and the reason both governments shut the program down at gunpoint.