Hey all! I posted this question earlier in /r/askhistory, and two people told me to repost it here, so here I am. First of all, why the hell are there two forums for exactly the same purpose? It's just really confusing.
Moving on, my question is this: how did people prior to the enlightenment think of drugs? I'm an opiate addict (now retired, thankfully) and I always used to think that prohibition was this arbitrary modern invention, but now I'm being told that actually, the whole enterprise of drugs as being commodified happiness is a modern invention. In the past, drugs were simply not widely available enough to be abused, nor strong enough, like today's drugs, which were invented in the past 100 years mostly. Can someone enlighten me about this topic? I want to understand, basically from like a Kuhnian perspective, how the paradigm of drug use has shifted over the past 100,000 odd years. That's a pretty tall order, so if you have little anecdotal pockets of knowledge about this, that's obviously ok.
I'm posting this in /r/opiatesrecovery, so please do not fucking respond with tired cliches about willpower and demonizing drug users for lack of self control. That may be true, but it's just not useful to say such things.
There are indications that ancient people in the past were addicted to drugs. One of the most famous examples from the Roman era is The Opium Addiction of Marcus Aurelius, which was published in the early 1960s.
The drug mix was called theriac and was quite popular among the Roman upper classes. Some versions, including the Emperor's, had poppy juice as an ingredient. Marcus took the drug to help him sleep, and apparently became so addicted to it that it became impossible to sleep without it.
There is little information that I know of about what others thought of this drug addiction. They don't seem to have recognised it as addiction - the physician Galen seems to have thought that Marcus' physical condition was deteriorating to the state that the quantity and quality of drugs needed to be increased.
Source: Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life.