98
votes
Accepted
What drugs were used in England during the High Middle Ages?
English meadows and forests are and were full of psychoactive substances.
They were used.
Quite creatively.
Partially isolated, on their own. But also in what psychiatrists call polytoxicomania. In ...
- 80.6k
70
votes
Was any stimulant used in wars before WW2 that gave a significant advantage to soldiers?
FC: What exactly is a 'stimulant'? We might follow some modern definition and arrive at a certain restricted subset of chemicals that includes meth and modafinil. But that excludes quite a bit of ...
- 80.6k
48
votes
Accepted
Why did Bayer lose aspirin and heroin trademarks under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles?
This is a quite convoluted story. But in short: the common story is a bit too short for correctness. The Versailles Treaty was quite bad on many accounts, but it was not really responsible alone for ...
- 80.6k
47
votes
Accepted
How prevalent were recreational drugs in the ancient world?
Drugs are certainly not a new phenomenon. Two well-known examples are opiates and cannabis. A great deal has been written about the use of hashish by medieval Nizari Ismailis (which gave us the word "...
- 77.2k
35
votes
Was any stimulant used in wars before WW2 that gave a significant advantage to soldiers?
Caffeine is a stimulant and it was heavily Used in the US Civil War. At the time, it was believed to “[give] a significant advantage”:
Grinspan states that Union General Benjamin Butler was aware ...
- 8,266
18
votes
Was any stimulant used in wars before WW2 that gave a significant advantage to soldiers?
KOLA NUTS
In sub-Saharan Africa, kola nuts have long been used by soldiers. For example, in the Sudan,
Military officials dispensed kola to their soldiers before battle. It
was thought to make ...
- 108k
18
votes
How prevalent were recreational drugs in the ancient world?
I think one of the largest problems you are going to have is the term "recreational drugs". That term is by and large a new term. People and civilizations from back then would not have categorized ...
- 774
14
votes
How prevalent were recreational drugs in the ancient world?
The number one recreational drug in history is ethanol. Commonly served as beer or fermented fruit juice.
It is and was cheap and easy to make, and has destroyed lives in all of recorded history.
...
- 341
11
votes
Accepted
What's the earliest evidence of drug abuse?
The way that the question is framed is laced with quite modern conceptions of "abuse" and "drugs" that would be completely incomprehensible for earlier people.
Yet the word 'drug' ...
- 80.6k
11
votes
What percentage of the British Empire's economy was profits from the opium trade?
There is no doubt that opium and tea formed a "commercial nexus" that became an essential element of the British imperial economy. Although the British government wasn't directly involved in the opium ...
- 77.2k
9
votes
Which car was the first to come with a cigarette lighter receptacle?
Absent further clarification in the question, we might first have to differentiate between:
1. the first car with an electric lighter ("installed/wired in"?),
2. with such a lighter as standard ...
8
votes
Where is the Nemesis?
It would appear that some of the confusion about the fate of the Nemesis is due to the naval tradition of naming new vessels in honour of their famous predecessors. In this case, when the famous ...
- 18.8k
8
votes
Were there hippies in the USA in 1930?
Hip/Hipster
According to Britannica, The etymological roots of the word Hippy derives from the root word "Hip", and the closest thing we have to Hippies in the 1930's would be African ...
- 3,098
7
votes
How did the baking soda recipe for crack cocaine catch on?
Smoking cocaine never became mainstream. It remained a part of drug sub-culture. It was propagated among cocaine users who were looking to get higher, and could afford to smoke obscene amounts of ...
- 3,330
7
votes
Accepted
Was WWII Systemic Drug Use by Axis and Allies Supported By Scholarship?
This was studied in Germany.
First it was expert testimonial by empirically experienced medics, then it was seen as results in the field and tested on regular soldiers, and finally on a lot of ...
- 80.6k
7
votes
How common was drug abuse and related deaths in the USA during the conservative 1950s?
In the 1950s, drug abuse took place day and night in millions of middle-class bathrooms. The medicine cabinets of average white Americans featured dangerous, highly addictive, 100% legal drugs ...
- 91
6
votes
Accepted
What were the most used drugs in battles and wars?
It's probably alcohol, with tobacco (nicotine) and caffeine at distant second and third.
These drugs don't directly enhance performance, but are great at maintaining morale. In the case of alcohol, ...
- 14.5k
5
votes
Who made wine from poisonous Heracleum?
“The northern group of nationalities, especially the Itelmen of Kamchatka, had had another stimulant - wine from 'sweet herb'. The secret of its production passed from them to Russian Cossacks and ...
- 51
5
votes
How common was drug abuse and related deaths in the USA during the conservative 1950s?
Well, drugs and drug abuse has been around since the beginning of man, of that I am positive. In the Victorian era, for instance, addiction to laudanum was a major thing. Mary Todd Lincoln (the First ...
- 3,606
4
votes
How prevalent were recreational drugs in the ancient world?
Not sure if you are asking solely about Europe and the classical world, but the New World people and empires used drugs in a sense that might today be called recreational, but probably more accurately ...
- 345
4
votes
Is there evidence that communists supplied drugs to West Berlin?
I found some news reports from the 1970s saying that the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had evidence that heroin was being smuggled into West Berlin, and that the smuggling was being done ...
- 77.2k
4
votes
How common was drug abuse and related deaths in the USA during the conservative 1950s?
Two short answers:
1) By today's standards, "not a lot."
2) By the standards of the preceding decades, "a lot." That's because the 1950s represented the "dawn" of today's drug culture.
"...
- 104k
3
votes
Accepted
Drug abuse in the Holy Land?
Mainly wine or fortified wines and beer. Other drugs did exist, but nowhere near what we have today. Distillation wasn't invented yet, so strong alcoholic beverages didn't exist. Fortified wines did, ...
- 20.3k
3
votes
Accepted
Were tobacco and marijuana ever competing products?
No. Although it is true that hemp was grown and harvested in Europe,
...is grown specifically for the industrial uses of its derived
products. It is one of the fastest growing plants and was one ...
- 38.5k
3
votes
What was Karl Marxs views on drug use?
Our modern attitude towards opiates is vastly different from that of 19th century.
E.g., addiction was not really a well known problem.
When Marx famously said that religion is the opiate of the ...
- 26.8k
2
votes
2
votes
Were there hippies in the USA in 1930?
The 1930s* was not an ideal decade to become a "hippie," i.e., to pursue a bohemian lifestyle.
A high tide of leisure, power, and affluence - think late 1950s-60s, mid-80s - is more ...
- 91
2
votes
Were there hippies in the USA in 1930?
While hippies as we traditionally see them didn't exist in the same manner back in the 1930s, the precursors to the hippie movement were around back then. The Lebensreform movement which started in ...
- 773
1
vote
How did the baking soda recipe for crack cocaine catch on?
I found a source which confirms your suspicions expressed in part 2. Cocaine is the main form being imported, then it is converted to crack by the local gangs (emphasis mine):
Production
Coca ...
- 38.5k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible