I’m writing a paper regarding drug use and alcoholism during the Renaissance period, but I’m lacking information regarding opium “addiction” . I’ve found plenty of info regarding opium usage and pills, but I can’t find any info on the so called “epidemic” of opium use (that’s what my teacher called it) . Thanks for your time and any help.
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Did he mention where/what time the "epidemic" was? I've been researching the origins of opium for a few weeks and haven't found anything specific on large-scale European usage at the time. There are some records of usage in the Roman times, but it seemed as though records of opium disappeared during the Inquisition as "In the eyes of the Inquisition, anything from the East was linked to the Devil." Regardless, the Venetians dominated the silk road and had may have had connections to opium from the Middle East/Egypt.
The domination of the Venetians in terms of the trade route inspired the Portuguese and Spanish to push out on colonial conquest, which for the Portuguese, led to their presence across Asia. This got Portuguese traders involved in opium, but there didn't seem to be large scale usage back in Europe. Once the Dutch started pushing their colonial conquests, they started getting more involved in opium trading and sales across India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The Portuguese traders may have established the initial trading links through Macau into China which would later power the Opium Wars (that's in the 1800s though). Towards the end of the Renaissance period, the British got involved and started taking over more territories in Asia and started monopolizing the opium trade.
From what I was reading, it seemed as though trade was pretty isolated to Asia. Until morphine in the 1800s, opium didn't really make it back in a meaningful way. Laudanum and other pharmaceutical uses were around from the 1500s, but again, I didn't see anything that made it seem like there was wide usage of these outside of medicinal usage. According to the PBS article above Laudanum got reintroduced in 1527. It didn't get popular until mid-1600s when popularized in London, but still it didn't seem to become a problem till the mid-1800s, when over usage of Laudanum led to more companies pushing heroin which introduced that towards the late 1800s and set the stage for both prohibition (thanks to religious/Puritanical views) and the resulting rise of criminal syndicates to take fill the gaps left by governments.
Sources for the above two paragraphs/good sources on the topic:
The Politics of Heroin by Alfred McCoy
Opium and opioids: a brief history
The Company's Chinese Pirates: How the Dutch East India Company Tried to Lead a Coalition of Pirates to War against China, 1621-1662 by Tonio Andrade
The Economic Importance of Indian Opium and Trade with China on Britain's Economy 1843 - 1890
How Britain Went to War With China Over Opium
A History of Europe, Key Battles Podcast episodes 42.1-42.4 & a few Tides of History episodes on the Portuguese and Dutch.