the underground market: more pernicious than narcotics — "Picture millions of average nonabnormal North…"
Picture millions of average nonabnormal North Americans, all implanted with Briggs electrodes, all with electronic access to their own personal p-terminals, never leaving home, thumbing their personal stimulation levers over and over.
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.