Why are most drugs mostly made of carbon and hydrogen, and some with oxygen and trace amounts of other elements?

Question

I understand that carbon is what makes something “organic” or not, I just don’t understand why so many drugs are essentially hydrocarbons of varying sizes.

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Answer 1

The quickest analogy I can think of is to compare drugs to keys. Keys are typically made of similar base materials, but the little bumps and grooves let them work on different locks. With drugs, the base materials have lots in common, but the little differences in composition and configuration (a twisty of double-bond here or a different not-hydrogen there) let the drugs fit different purposes. In that analogy, the lock that the key fits could be a receptor on a cell or maybe the active site of an enzyme or so on.