If you want to get technical, doesn’t it? When some particular variety of thing is popular across all human cultures, doesn’t this point to it addressing some deep desire we might put on mazlow’s? What distinguishes a deep, innate human desire from a need?

One way to distinguish them is the retrospective analysis of the outcome. What happens when someone obtains or goes without each category?

To go deeper, I think one needs to more fully defined "need”. Need for what? Are we talking about needs.. to sustain biological life? Are we talking about needs... To sustain happy and productive lives?

If we take the second definition, there is a pretty clear difference between a desire and a need. Satisfaction of a desire does not necessarily advance that goal, and can very well be counter to it.

I would just argue that “happy and productive“ is vastly too reductive. This seems like a very difficult definition to nail down, but those needs which are not required for survival would probably be defined as something like “those things which increase the flourishing of, maximize the potential of, and/or contribute to a valid and lasting feeling of deep satisfaction in the individual.”

From this definition, it seems like some drugs and some uses of drugs are most certainly not necessary while others seem to be contributing to a real psychological need. Some drugs can give people insight into the nature of their own mind or of their experience, or reshape their worldview for the better. They can allow us to experiment with our own consciousness, which seems to be something that we derive a lot of satisfaction and even utility from. In these cases, drugs may be fulfilling a need. Simultaneously we can recognize that drug use intended more just to anesthetize or produce blind pleasure is most likely not contributing to a need, as it was defined above.