Ah I see.
I think, when I unsertand it correctly, there indeed is a difference between taking this drug if you have pain or if you do not have pain, but just want pleassure. It says on one page, that (like today the case) if you would need it against pain and you take it under very controlled circumstances (the dose and lengh of time) the risc of addiction is just very, very small. If on the other hand a person would just take it for pleassure than the potential of addiction is high and an addiction can be there after a few times taking it. Morphine of course as a higher risc of addiction, also today, but than today very, very sick people mostly get high doses of morphine, like my aunt did, her last days in life, before dying off cancer...and there it really does not matter, if one gets addicted or not, what matters is no pain. Well and heroin of course is strongly addictive. However during regency times heroin was not yet discovered and while morphine was already known by 1804 it first started to be a real problem later on in that century. During the regency however the taking of opium in form of laudanum or others ways was not very controlled, so I suppose there were many addicts, but Thomas De Quincy for example could take it for 8 years just now and than without much negative consequenses (and first later on used it daily). And as for laudanum that must have produced a double addiction anyway with consisting to 90% of alcohol, don´t you think?
Past medcine is really quite the scary thing. But than, who knows what things we do today that in 200 years people will look at in a similar way. We certainly have more knowledge about many things, but not all.
Jaimy
I think, when I unsertand it correctly, there indeed is a difference between taking this drug if you have pain or if you do not have pain, but just want pleassure. It says on one page, that (like today the case) if you would need it against pain and you take it under very controlled circumstances (the dose and lengh of time) the risc of addiction is just very, very small. If on the other hand a person would just take it for pleassure than the potential of addiction is high and an addiction can be there after a few times taking it. Morphine of course as a higher risc of addiction, also today, but than today very, very sick people mostly get high doses of morphine, like my aunt did, her last days in life, before dying off cancer...and there it really does not matter, if one gets addicted or not, what matters is no pain. Well and heroin of course is strongly addictive. However during regency times heroin was not yet discovered and while morphine was already known by 1804 it first started to be a real problem later on in that century. During the regency however the taking of opium in form of laudanum or others ways was not very controlled, so I suppose there were many addicts, but Thomas De Quincy for example could take it for 8 years just now and than without much negative consequenses (and first later on used it daily). And as for laudanum that must have produced a double addiction anyway with consisting to 90% of alcohol, don´t you think?
Past medcine is really quite the scary thing. But than, who knows what things we do today that in 200 years people will look at in a similar way. We certainly have more knowledge about many things, but not all.
Jaimy