Stimulants in Germanic communities of the Roman period | Hacker News Reader

Stimulants in Germanic communities of the Roman period

degruyter.com

This seems like a huge stretch. They find tiny spoons, and assume (based on no evidence whatsoever) they are used for taking drugs. Then they list a bunch of plants available in Europe which contain drugs. None of which are commonly powdered and snorted like they are proposing.

I admittedly just skimmed the article, so maybe I missed something.

They mention that the length of the thong by which the spoon is attached to the belt is about the right length to lift it to your face, but that's it.

Maybe they really liked tasting ice cream.

no, I'm pretty sure that's basically it.

"we found something that kinda looks like a coke spoon in some Germanic warrior burials, let's see what drugs were available to people back then - opium, nightshades, cannabis and various fungi, notably ergot".

That was what I got out of it.

I thought the same thing when this paper made the rounds last week.

Northern Europeans went to great lengths to import stimulants (tea, coffee, tobacco…) from around the world. It seems unlikely they had some other, native preparation for insufflation that was lost to time.

Maybe. OTOH there were native, and are still known, but not in wide use, because of inconvenient side effects. Maybe the common knowledge of how to manage these got lost because of societal changes (no more druids/shamans), social taboos (witch hunts) because of churches and so on, and lately modern laws?

Just a few of them:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claviceps_purpurea

and probably some forms of

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis

Bronze pipes have been discovered in Roman-era settlements and even earlier sites. That's a long time before tobacco was available in Europe.

cannabis and opium are both smokable, and accord to TFA were both present in Central Europe during the ancient times.

I’ve never seen that, but I’d love to find it. Do you have a reference? It’s my understanding that there was no smoking in Europe before Columbus. (With the exception of smoking tents, like in Herodotus or the biblical tabernacle)

(Joke)

Maybe there was an undocumented trade route with South America and they were sniffing ground up coca leaves?

(Seriously, it's a joke)

Yeah, even the intro is just "we found this, so we assumed this and that". Nothing resembling science here. It's an "idea exploration paper" and nothing more.

Somewhat related but a fascinating book on drugs and Germany is

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Normal Ohler

  The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs. On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact, troops regularly took rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to explain certain German military victories.

  Drugs seeped all the way up to the Nazi high command and, especially, to Hitler himself. Over the course of the war, Hitler became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—including a form of heroin—administered by his personal doctor. While drugs alone cannot explain the Nazis’ toxic racial theories or the events of World War II, Ohler’s investigation makes an overwhelming case that, if drugs are not taken into account, our understanding of the Third Reich is fundamentally incomplete.

interesting, thanks for sharing this ^_^

I'd heard that towards the end of WW2 Hitler was getting daily shots of speed/meth administered by his doctors, who told him it was 'vitamins' but didn't know he did other stuff as well (the him being hopped on amphetamine/methamphetamine does actually make a lot of sense to me).

Looked up his Wikipedia article, it has this to say:

> Hitler began using amphetamine occasionally after 1937 and became addicted to it in late 1942... > Prescribed 90 medications during the war years by his personal physician, Theodor Morell, Hitler took many pills each day for chronic stomach problems and other ailments. He regularly consumed amphetamine, barbiturates, opiates, and cocaine, as well as potassium bromide and atropa belladonna (the latter in the form of Doktor Koster's Antigaspills).

themoreyouknow.jpg

I heard that it is not very well historically accurate and that it wastly overstates the role of drugs in Nazi Reich for the sake of sensationalism

Any source to the aural confirmation you're pushing on us?

Sure, here is a scripture from the Cambridge history professor https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/blitzed-drugs-...

I can push another scripture towards you that states that drug use didn't significantly influence military strategies or outcomes: https://www.rogermoorhouse.com/blitzed-by-norman-ohler-a-his...

Sorry for being pushy, am not a historian so don't take my aural confirmations for granted

US also handed out a lot of benzedrine (normal amphetamine, not methamphetamine)

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