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"'And do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.' They went out, laughing."

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"Benito stared after him. 'What can be the matter with the fellow?' he wondered, and, shaking his head, decided that the story about the alcohol having been put into the poor chap's blood surrogate must be true. 'Touched his brain, I suppose.'"

The cause of all of Bernard's shortcomings are due to the alcohol in his body.

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"By this time the soma had begun to work. Eyes shone, cheeks were flushed, the inner light of universal benevolence broke out on every face in happy, friendly smiles. Even Bernard felt himself a little melted."

This quote shows some of the effects of soma when Bernard takes it.

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"[Bernard] lifted one hand from the controls and, slipping his arm around [Lenina], began to fondle her breasts.... Half an hour later they were back in his rooms. Bernard swallowed four tablets of soma at a gulp, turned on the radio and television and began to undress."

Bernard uses soma as a way to let himself be okay with popular activities in his society. In this instance, Bernard is using the numbing effects of soma to give in to having sex with Lenina.

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"Lenina felt herself entitled, after this day of queerness and horror, to a complete and absolute holiday. As soon as they got back to the rest house, she swallowed six half gramme tablets of soma, lay down on her bed, and within ten minutes had embarked for lunar eternity. It would be eighteen hours at the least before she was in time again."

After a rough day, Lenina immediately decides to numb her dissatisfaction with soma, which will cause her to be out of commission for 18 hours at least. This shows that Lenina would much rather be high on soma all the time and live in a fake world instead of facing her problems like an adult.

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"The return to civilization was for [Linda] the return to soma, was the possibility of lying in bed and taking holiday after holiday, without ever having to come back to a headache or a fit of vomiting, without ever being made to feel as you always felt after peyotl, as though you'd done something so shamefully anti social that you could never hold up your head again. Soma played none of these unpleasant tricks. The holiday it gave was perfect and, if the morning after was disagreeable, it was so, not intrinsically, but only by comparison with the joys of the holiday. The remedy was to make the holiday continuous. Greedily she clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day. 'Which will finish her off in a month or two,' the doctor confided to Bernard. 'One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed. No more breathing. Finished.'"

Linda abuses the effects of soma to escape from the social anxiety and pain of the real world to such an extreme extent that she consents to overdosing on the drug. The appeal of soma is it creates an environment where nothing can hurt you and you always feel happy when you take a "holiday". This premise is dangerous when you mix it with the intense societal pressure put on all the citizens of the World State.

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"Helmholtz and the Savage took to one another at once. So cordially indeed that Bernard felt a sharp pang of jealousy. In all these weeks he had never come to so close an intimacy with the Savage as Helmholtz immediately achieved. Watching them, listening to their talk, he found himself sometimes resentfully wishing that he had never brought them together. He was ashamed of his jealousy and alternately made efforts of will and took soma to keep himself from feeling it. But the efforts were not very successful; and between the soma holidays there were, of necessity, intervals."

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"The Deltas muttered, jostled one another a little, and then were still. The threat had been effective. Deprivation of soma - appalling thought!"

Deltas are given soma in order to control them. Deltas are threatened by the mention of taking soma away from them.

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"And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there's always soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there's always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears - that's what soma is."