I was unimpressed with how drugs were handled in New Vegas (didn't play FO3). I felt like the consequences for using them were rather paltry, which resulted in them being more appealing than I thought something like drugs should have been.

Yes, because Skyrim is very well known for its pot...

...Or whatever else I assume that skooma is made of. <_<

meh. doesn't seem like something that would affect too much. throw it in then (imo) if they got the time to do so.

Okay, to start, skooma should be addictive and that addiction should affect your stats as well as the visual appearance of the game. The altered appearance would be one way to help mimic the effects of the psychological state the drug puts you in when you're high, when you're coming down, and when you're in the multiple stages of withdrawal. Whereas some people in this thread have focused on the statistical effects the addiction should have on your character, my post will focus on the visual ones...visual details that help the player feel the addiction him/herself.

(Wow look at the colors man...)

Using the drug increases strength and speed while draining agility and intelligence, but I think when high on skooma, the world should seem to come alive with a 'drug-induced vibrancy' which basically represents an increased state of awareness, as your character's senses are heightened by the drug. In the darkness, it should become much easier to see without any form of light. In the day or well lit areas, the world should radiate with a vivid glow and your focus on anything alive and moving should be accentuated somehow. The world could blur slightly around the outline of anything moving about in your field of view on the screen, to help highlight and clarify your focus on that thing that is moving. This would be extremely useful for identifying threats in the area(almost like a version of detect life but without the annoying purple glow).

Next...(all good things must come to an end)

You should not suffer from addiction after a single use, nor should you become addicted from several well spaced out uses of the drug, but even when coming down from the effects of the drug in these 'addiction free' instances, some sort of mild, but dreary, color filter should alter your view of the world for a specific amount of time to create a slight sense of loss and despair that the player notices (the balance of the blissful high). This would essentially dull your senses and the increased sight you had while high. As you come down your sight should 'crash' below what your normal vision would have been like, had you not used the drug at all. The screen should darken, and muddy. It should become difficult to see at night; shadows and dark areas should become that much darker. Isolated light sources in the darkness should develop a high contrast, to the point that they blind rather than illuminate and become painful to look at. In the daylight the world should shift from vibrant and radiant to a dreary gray pall; seemingly sapping the color and life from the world. All of these effects should eventually return to the 'norm' once a certain amount of time has passed after you came down off the drug.

Next...(welcome to the dark side of the moon, sugar)

Addiction. Once addiction has set in through multiple uses of the drug within a compressed amount of time, then that normal vision you once had as a drug free character should no longer exist. Without the drug, your sight and view of the world should remain fixed along varying degrees of that bleak, dark, dreary, gray, muddied outlook on life. It should hinder gameplay and become an absolute nuissance to the player, forcing him/her to find more skooma to suppress the effect. It should eventually reach a worse state, in which your character seems to develop a form of tunnel vision and the perimeter of the screen starts to become terribly blurry, leaving only what is directly ahead, clear for you to see. This could represent the on-set of withdrawal, and should become increasingly worse over the period of several days without the drug. Also during this time, when withdrawal has set-in, your reticle or central point of focus should develop a twitchy, jerky affect, making it increasingly difficult to do anything accurately and efficiently, whether it be aim a bow, wield a sword or pick a flower. This effect should also get worse over time, until your focus shakes violently about, whenever you try to do anything at all. Use of the drug at any point during these stages of withdrawal will pull your character out of his state of despair, but will require more skooma to reach that initial high and even then the effects should not be quite as great as they once were. Then the lengthy process of withdrawal would begin anew.

Next...(cleanliness is next to divineliness)

If you manage to keep from abusing the drug through the withdrawal process, your character should eventually reach a point when he has become clean and the detrimental effects should slowly begin to subside, until your vision and focus have reverted back to a normal state. Lesson learned the hard way...stay off the skooma!

I posted this in a similar thread and copied it here since it seems to apply.

Skooma is made of moon sugar, just highly refined. I am also not quite sure the legality of Skooma/Moon sugar in Skyrim. Probably wont be much of it due to the vast differences in climate. Elsweyr/Skyrim. Nords aren't really of the narcotic based users. They prefer to be alcohol drinkers.