According to Garner's Modern American Usage, which is considered a leading, if not the leading, book on American language usage today, drug (for dragged) is a dialectal form common in the southern United States. The dictionaries consider it nonstandard and the OED calls it obsolete except in dialect. The American Regional English Dictionary (1991) lists the form dragged as "usual" and drug as "also frequent."
Drug (for dragged) has been found to be frequently used in Nebraska, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Illinois, Kansas, and Tennesee; "very common" in East Alabama; and "common" in Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, and in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.
One commentator, in 1953, summed up the difference as "Dragged . . . predominates among cultured informants everywhere. . . .[In the noncultured] types it is more or less narrowly limited by the competing form drug."
Pick your poison (cultural level) and shoot!
|