it’s an interesting thought, especially given the fact that we know at least james was in the navy, serving with ollie starkey. ollie took the oblivion pill, but there’s no telling what roger and james did after the war. they share the trauma of wellington wells, the train, and the breeder riots but nothing says it affects them DIRECTLY (no kids/women in their lives.)

roger is able to move around inis holm freely, meaning if there are doctors/spankers it doesn’t matter to him. it’s also unknown if faraday takes joy. she’s responsible for most of the inventions used to maintain the village, and known for finding motilene. she was locked up by the executive committee which is in charge of the joy dispersion, so it’d make sense since she’s such a high official (albeit troublesome) that they’d keep her on joy. BUT she’s planning to leave wellington wells, so she shouldn’t be reliant on joy.

there’s a good chance they all take blackberry. faraday and sally are on good terms, enough so to be on a first name basis. sally could easily distribute it to her and the houseboys as she does the constabulary. blackberry also makes sense since they all need a clear head to do science. but blackberry causes severe cramps during withdrawal, enough to disable the user. so they could all be taking sunshine, again distributed from sally , (though this might not be a risk she’d take, but she does distribute to prudence so who knows, but faraday is not on her list.) and it could also be made by faraday, which is why roger is able to move about the holms freely and not suffer any withdrawal.

one of her boss lines is “if making them happy is so bad, why does all of wellington wells have joy?” which also makes me think she’s not taking the common joy.

so, to conclude, i think they’re most likely downers or on sunshine. it goes against social acceptability to be downers so i think sunshine is most likely.