Dorothy: if I ever go looking for my Perry Mason clip again, I won’t look any further than post #61. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with!
In seriousness, although it didn’t originate with the Perry Mason episode, at least at that time it was seen as normal, if slang, vernacular. It was stated several times in the episode and it wasn’t played for laughs. IOW, everyone took the phrase seriously and understood that it meant to be intoxicated on a controlled substance.
As a fun sighting, I watched an Adam-12 today. David Cassidy (!) was a teenager who took too many seconals. Or as Malloy said, “Red Devils, we used to call them ‘goofballs’.”
However, he was not described as hopped up. Bummer, man.