Drugs and warfare: from Homer to ISIS.
Trmadol and a meth/caffiene like drug are the favorites of ISIS, but the use of drugs in war has a long history.
the Homer part comes from this article:
Ten top drugs used in the ancient world includes this part on the Blue Lotus.
But another passage relates how Helen learned about Egyptian drugs, and at a party, mixed some of them with the wine to ease the sadness of her husband and the visiting soldiers: I.e. as a treatment of PTSS.
Homer had described in ‘The Odyssey’ that the Lotus had taken away our hero’s willpower as if he had become a slave of an unreal dream – “Once tasted, no desire felt he come with tidings back or seek his country more.”
[219] Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, took other counsel. Straightway she cast into the wine of which they were drinking a drug to quiet all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill. Whoso should drink this down, when it is mingled in the bowl, would not in the course of that day let a tear fall down over his cheeks, no, not though his mother and father should lie there dead, or though before his face men should slay with the sword his brother or dear son, and his own eyes beheld it. Such cunning drugs had the daughter of Zeus, drugs of healing, which Polydamna, the wife of Thon, had given her, a woman of Egypt, for there the earth, the giver of grain, bears greatest store of drugs, many that are healing when mixed, and many that are baneful; there every man is a physician, wise above human kind; for they are of the race of Paeeon.
so again we see the double edged sword of medicine and alcohol that has been recognized since ancient times.
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