And Kamuor takes her two subway stops home and pays her cook and guard some hush money and shows Rhonda to a guest room.

Rhonda thanks Kamuor and flops down on the bed and takes out her everything and tries to see if they have something vaguely like wikipedia. 

They do, it's called Summary Bank.

Cool she's just gonna semi-aimlessly wikiwalk for a while. And then go back to the language-learning app, because bleah. 

Summary Bank is suited for wiki-walking and she can learn things about hair dye and the time zone system and fishing regulations and hypersensitivity and the effects of lineality on immigration.

Hypersensitivity is definitely a "hoo boy" kinda subject. She is so glad she glossed over a buncha things about her world. If anyone asks her about San Francisco she's gonna have to lie so hard but fortunately she can't imagine that coming up. Meanwhile she's going to have to figure out a fake decontamination procedure other than "you just take a normal shower, seriously, dead bodies are not objectively that gross;" she feels like that wouldn't impress them much. Maybe she can say they have the same thing but with different soaps and no she doesn't know anything about what the soaps are made of she could just clean things directly. That'd make sense.

Bleeeaaah. This pollution instinct stuff is dumb. On...the other hand...the middle ages on Earth. So it's got some stuff going for it. 

She keeps doing her language-learning app until she gets tired of it and then decides to compromise by listening to local music with lyrics. 

There is local music with lyrics! Lots of it! There's ads mixed in.

Well, par for the course. What can she figure out about what the ads are selling? 

Shampoo, foot massages, vouchers to try five different sex workers of your choice from this particular business and get an extra booking with your favorite for free, fluffy towels, tropical cruises.

Prostitution is legal here? 

Yup! Looks like that's the case all over the planet. It's gray or orange depending on the country. If she looks, indistinguishable numbers of male and female prostitutes are available.

Huh! What about drugs? 

They have those. The ones that are actually illegal are the ones that are especially easy to die on or that have some kind of political issue with their import or that make people behave in criminal ways; if you just want to get high, you can find a way to do that almost anywhere. Some countries screen for addiction as a eugenics measure.

Huh. Easy to die on like tobacco or easy to die on like your trip lasts too long and you dehydrate? 

The latter (also things people are often allergic to or that are hard to dose). Mostly they seem to solve things in the class of tobacco with aggressive taxation for the externalities and the cost to their health systems.

Sounds valid...what do they have for organized crime? 

They mostly don't seem to treat it as a special category.

Well, she was planning to be more aboveboard here anyway. She idly skims through the drugs banned for political reasons, but she mostly invents her own drugs anyway so it doesn't seem super important. 

This one was subject to an import problem that also affected molybdenum and eyeshadow, and some people had withdrawal, and tried to pressure the government to make concessions necessary to reopen trade, and that backfired; this one in its therapeutic applications was involved with some sketchy medical practices and got expensive suddenly when it was taken off the therapeutic market and then its addicts started committing crimes and it was banned outright for a five year term while law enforcement dealt with that; this one was a favorite of illegal immigrants but unpopular domestically, and making it illegal made it easier to track down the illegal immigrants.

...Making it illegal when its addicts started committing crimes worked???

Well, since it had been legal before that, most of the people selling it were law-abiding types who removed it from the shelves and most of the rest were willing to turn in their customers after taking some government money about it.

...And this didn't cause a huge black market for it or anything. Okay. She...can see how that might work, if governments were actually sensible instead of treating drug addicts like lepers...

(It's still weird.)

What kinds of processes do countries have for making drugs legal to distribute? 

Typically: You need to do both animal testing and have a computer model of how you expect it to work on Amentans, then you need to test it on some number of people (the numbers vary depending on the cost/benefit analysis, plus nationally), then you can test it with fewer restrictions on a larger number, then you can have it available for sale. Most countries have reciprocity agreements, occasionally with a delay in case a drug takes a couple years to turn up an obscure problem.

...Do they have any kind of controversy over animal testing? 

Some people think it doesn't work very well and they should be testing more things on reds instead. A country called Doet in fact does that instead.