What is the correlation between drug use and the lock-down measures during pandemics? In the Intoxicating Spaces project (https://www.intoxicatingspaces.org/) we have looked at plague epidemics in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Northwestern Europe. In this period there is also an increasing use of new intoxicants including opium and tobacco. So is there a connection?

In the recent article of Phil Withington, Gabrielle Robilliard, Karin Sennefelt and myself (‘Plague and intoxicants in the Baltic and North Seas during the long seventeenth century’), published in Continuity and Change (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416025100817), we argue that medical responses to plague were a cause of the ‘psychoactive revolution’ during the long seventeenth century. Focusing on four metropoles in the Baltic and North Sea region, it shows that the commodification of sugar, opiates and tobacco during the last century of the Second Great Pandemic correlates both with outbreaks of plague in Amsterdam, Hamburg, London and Stockholm and with the intra-regional prescription of these intoxicants in popular and authorized plague physic. In so doing, it argues for the importance of household consumption practices in driving the psychoactive revolution and points to the importance of women as well as men in the popularization of intoxicants. It identifies an under-appreciated set of consumer motives informing household consumption practices: not least the need to allay fear, pain and bodily and mental disorder.