Opium was available, but only as a poppy juice or tea used routinely in Roman medicine with little reports of addiction. The same thing happens in Chinese medicine—it’s introduced around the 900s as a new useful medicine from the Silk Road which is especially useful for settling one’s stomach & aiding digestion and only later as time passed did methods change, did the bulbs get scratched to extract the sap which could be eaten and eventually smoked, leading to its final apotheosis when it is chemically processed into heroin and an injectable fine white powder (discussed in McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin).
The theory that Aurelius was addicted stems from his doctor Galen’s well-recorded constant administration of various potions some of which included poppy juice, Aurelius’s recommendation of poppy-using recipes in his Meditations, and general argument based on his Stoic detachment and perspective (McLynn’s Marcus Aurelius: A Life).
To state he was addicted with no qualification is to overstate the case—we’re talking probabilities greater than 5% but probably less than 50-60%, my own belief is.
Could you get a more specific claim?
A cursory search suggests that opium was available and Marcus Aurelius was addicted, but not that addiction was common.
Whoah. Seriously? That throws his legendarily insightful writings on Stoicism into an entirely different light.
Opium was available, but only as a poppy juice or tea used routinely in Roman medicine with little reports of addiction. The same thing happens in Chinese medicine—it’s introduced around the 900s as a new useful medicine from the Silk Road which is especially useful for settling one’s stomach & aiding digestion and only later as time passed did methods change, did the bulbs get scratched to extract the sap which could be eaten and eventually smoked, leading to its final apotheosis when it is chemically processed into heroin and an injectable fine white powder (discussed in McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin).
The theory that Aurelius was addicted stems from his doctor Galen’s well-recorded constant administration of various potions some of which included poppy juice, Aurelius’s recommendation of poppy-using recipes in his Meditations, and general argument based on his Stoic detachment and perspective (McLynn’s Marcus Aurelius: A Life).
To state he was addicted with no qualification is to overstate the case—we’re talking probabilities greater than 5% but probably less than 50-60%, my own belief is.