Roman Drug Deal Gone Bad

[Carlton Bach]

Dioscurides, one of our best sources for the use of opium in the ancient world, was a military phyxsician, so the Roman troops definitely used it for medical purposes. As to personal use, I suspect the relatively high price (opium poppies don't cultivate well in the Mediterranean) would have been an effective deerrent for the aerage groundpounder to become an addict. After all, opium was known and in use throughout Europe since Antiquity, yet our first evidence of opium addiction becoming a social rather than individual problem date to the 19th century, when it becomes cheap and plentiful.

I would, however, caution against projecting modern attitudes to drug use on Roman military practice. Roman soldiers got to do a lot of things that modern militaries frowned upon. As long as a personal habit did not interfere with a soldier's effectiveness in his role it is quite likely that it would not have been addressed, and that role was not always combat. there are recorded instances of troops becoming quite thoroughly unfit for field duty.