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By Root 1145 0

in the Arab world in the eighth century, and they stocked a huge variety of opium medicines. Some great Muslim champions of opium were the famed ninth-century doctors Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, Sabur ibn Sahl, and Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi. Al-Kindi wrote in praise of opium medicine; Sabur’s four-hundred-odd opium or poppy recipes are for a range of remedies. Included are those that are “good for old age” and one that, if given to a healthy person, “will protect him from all pains and diseases.” The recipe in which he called for the most opium was for a drug that he says is “useful for stupidity and lethargy, and sharpens the brain.” One recipe for a drug to combat depression, charmingly called “Food for Sorrows,” included henbane and opium. If you have seen the HBO series Rome, you may have noted that after Titus Pullo was much injured in his unsuccessful execution, his doctor gave him henbane to keep him asleep, comfortable, and immobilized. The drug was also used to get high.

In the late ninth century, the great doctor and rationalist philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi was the first to introduce the use of alcohol for medical purposes. Al-Razi was surprisingly secularist and more concerned with people’s well-being than with religious rules. In surgery, alcohol could alleviate pain and give a patient courage, so he used it. The great medieval doctor and philosopher Avicenna was apparently quite a hash-head. In the vast Islamic world, opium use by the masses was well established by 1000 C.E. Hashish was very popular, too. European visitors have been amazed, throughout history, by the sheer quantity of these substances commonly consumed in the Islamic world. Sufis seem to have had a rich history with hashish and the use of hallucinogenic plants like mandrake and thorn apple.

There were opium apothecaries in Europe in the twelfth century. In 1240, the German emperor Frederick II issued an edict separating the practices of medicine and pharmacy, creating professional pharmacy and providing government supervision over pharmacists, who were to prepare drugs “reliably, according to skilled art, and in a uniform, suitable quality.” The pharmacy, or apothecary shop, was decorated with curiosities:giant stuffed crocodiles, turtle shells, the horns of rare beasts, and other treasures. As time went on, objects symbolic of magic and natural curiosities were joined by increasingly fanciful glass vials for the various opium concoctions. Drugs in artful majolica and faience jars were soon on display in the better homes as well. The apothecary shop became a meeting place where one could buy drugs, take drugs, and sit around gazing at the stunning glass sculpture, the taxidermy, and the exotic scientific devices. Medical consultations were available there, but this was also very much about socializing. These were places to relax and talk.12 Many doctors and pharmacists of the seventeenth century based their whole curative system on administering various opium potions.

The early modern period has a widely documented record of happiness-drug use in every stage of life. Scottish physician John Brown decided that emptying people out with bleedings and purgatives was a bad idea. His Elementa medicinae of 1780 claimed instead that the sick should be stimulated, and no stimulant was better than opium. He relied on it himself as a cure for gout. A contemporary of Brown’s, the physician George Young, took laudanum for his cough. He described a typical case from his practice, a woman with “a disponding mind” (a nice old term for depression) who “received more benefit from opium alone than I could well believe: it not only suspended her menstrual flooding, but all her fears and gloomy ideas.” This part raises eyebrows: “All her friends advised her to lay aside the use of opium, lest it should by habit become necessary, but she whispered privately, that she would rather lay aside her friends.” She reported that she stopped taking opium after a few months of her pregnancy and then just kept it on hand in case of “disponding fits.”13 Samuel Johnson