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By Root 1260 0

desperation. They may use it anyway, perhaps almost ironically. If one drug has been culturally associated with criminal violence, it is crack, and again, as in times past, control of cocaine has been envisioned as controlling certain racial groups and controlling the poor. This influences our ideas about the drug. With a clean cultural slate, perhaps we would look to ways to make milder forms of the drug and would make these available. For happiness. A lot of people would do it sometimes. Perhaps we should see today’s Wellbutrin use as similar to the use of coca leaves in ancient Peru.

The other major historical happiness drug is opium, the juice from the unripe seedpod of the flower Papaver somniferum. Why is opium a happiness drug? One of the purposes of this discussion is to show that although we think of opium as a drug of melancholy stupor, this is not how most of history experienced the drug. If you have done any historical research in old newspapers, you have seen ads for laudanum. The women in the ads are happy and lively, and the list of things the potion claimed to cure was long. Laudanum was opium and wine, spiced with saffron and cinnamon, and it certainly made a person feel better. You also may have seen movies where women drink from little vials in their purses and get catatonic. What’s up with the widow character on the series Deadwood who clings to a tiny vial? Laudanum. What were doctors thinking? Was it similar to what doctors think today when they prescribe Prozac? Why does it seem so irresponsible? My short answer to those questions is that people thought that poppy-juice happiness was good happiness. Part of the reason for this was the same situation as with cocaine: when modern labs, industrialism, and markets got their hands on the drug, superstrong versions were developed. In this case, heroin was one of the strongest and most dangerous, and the resulting deaths inspired some unusually virulent rejections of poppy drugs in our culture. The other reason nineteenth-century doctors handed out opium was because people of that time needed its medicinal properties more than we do. Where cocaine is great for allergies and toothaches, opium has a more important medicinal punch: it stops coughs and diarrhea. During the nineteenth-century epidemics of tuberculosis and dysentery—due in part to overcrowded industrial cities—the ability to steady the lungs and bowels was an incontestable blessing. For many people, it was health and happiness in one bottle.

Opium use for happiness goes back to prehistory. Sumerian ideograms dated to 4000 B.C.E. proclaim the poppy to be a plant of joy.8 In Egypt, around 1500 B.C.E., the Therapeutic Papyrus of Thebes prescribed opium as a cure for babies suffering colic. It worked, I presume, whether you gave it to the mother or the babe. It is in the fifth century B.C.E. that we see poppy use first discouraged, by the great philosophic author Diagoras of Melos, and caution was also encouraged by the West’s first great doctor, Hippocrates. For the next five hundred years we hear of it as a pleasure of the elite, mostly, but in the time of the great ancient doctor Galen (130–201 C.E.), its use seems to have become quite general. Galen wrote that there were lots of recipes for theriac, but that if it doesn’t have poppy juice, it is no good.9 Theriac was known first as an antidote to poisons from animal bites, and later as a cure for disease. The basic recipe was opium and spices in honey. Galen recorded his preparations of theriac with scientific detail. He kept especially careful records of his theriac preparations and their effects on his most famous patient, the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius.10 Depending on whether the emperor wanted to get happy, kill pain, or get to sleep, Galen adjusted the opium content of the honey potion. Galen’s records show that Aurelius was able to assess the quality of the ingredients and the dosage of a day’s potion, and he knew to abstain when need be for matters of state.

This is amazing and important. Marcus Aurelius is a great hero to almost