A cursory Gsearch seems to indicate this means to act strangely as if on drugs. But have you ever heard the expr used this way

Thanks anybody

Could you give us some examples of the exact usages? My "cursory" search on such a common pair of words turned up 365 million hits including lots of "one on one", "down on one knee", etc. etc.

"One" here is probably being used as a pronoun thus could stand for anything, e.g. Does Suzy ride a motorcycle? Yes, I've seen her on one. Does Johnny ever trip on LSD? Yes, I've seen him on one.

myr:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=on+one

The huge number of hits and the prospect of wading though them one at a time is exactly the reason I hoped a WS'er might be able to shed some immediate light

It seems, by the examples given, that the expression would be used in the middle of the conversation. As in:

Guy one: "Ugh, my head hurts. I really went on a drunk last night"
Guy two: "Ya, I was on one last week-end."

Well, Dale, looks like you found your definition at the urban dictionary?!

And to answer you, no I've never heard it. But then I'm no longer an urban teen.

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A cursory Gsearch seems to indicate this means to act strangely as if on drugs.

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So, your "cursory Gsearch" didn't indicate anything. You stumbled across one of the many Urban Dictionary entries that has a statistically insignificant number of votes.

FWIW, I heard parts of an interview with guy who runs Urban Dictionary on NPR this week. He has a full-time job at Google. He's not really a logophile, he's more in it to play with the community website interaction / programming aspects of collecting, accessing, displaying such a large dataset.