A post in the meme thread has got me wondering.
In medieval (and thus Mythic) Europe, is there anything equivalent to "smoking weed"?
Poppy seeds?
Toad licking?
Imbibing strong spirits?
There's a lot of drunkenness.
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Beer pre- hops could use any kind of herbs to help it keep, including henbane... which is why the Bavarians came up with laws to make all of their beers taste roughly the same...
But as pointed out, why get high when 7 alcoholic drinks a day is seen as very measured and restrictive.
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The French wiki version regarding Hooka/chicha/narguilé indicated that such accessories were unearth in Ethiopia and dated to be from 1320 with a +/- 80 yrs margin of error.
If it could be useful for your saga, you could stretch it to 1240, possibly have more primitive version earlier.
The article does not mention what was smoked since the America have not been discovered, thus tobacco would be unavailable Colombus return 1492-93 and the first seeds would likely be brought back mid 1500.
Smoking and pipes exist since Antiquities, with all kind of herbs. Considering that some divination process require inhaling smokes of some origins, it would not be a stretch that early on, some "recreative" or mystical usage of such smoke was used, although I don't have any historical documents to back that up.
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According to The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name by Brian C. Muraresku it is quite possible that in some parts of medieval europe until early Renaissance, witches were brewing beverages infused with hallucinogenic plants or even ergot, the fungus were LSD is coming from. Monks were also using verious herbs and plants to infuse their beers.
It was seen as a better and easier way to get in touch with god/deceased loved ones/whatever spirit than prayer and fasting for common people.
Until inquisition came and squashed it hard.
There are also plenty of hallucinogenic mushrooms, some very common. So depending on the culture, they can also be plenty abundant. Would somebody use it for recreative purpose, I don't know.
Opium and Hashish were known of since ancient Greece. Ancient Greek kánnabis was the transcription of a a Scythian term. In the earliest (ca. 440 BCE) reference to recreational cannabis usage, Herodotus recorded cannabis steam baths in The Histories.
Saint Hildegard of Bingen (1098 – 1179) wrote a treatise on natural medicine titled Causae et Curae. In this book, she advocates the use of various compounds that we would consider to be dangerous and illegal pyschoactive compounds. She also talks about the abuse of these compounds by some people and how to help them overcome addiction. But her ultimate conclusion is that all things were put on Earth for man to use and ingest so it's all fair game. She was particularly popular amongst monks seeking spiritual.
enlightenment.
In Medieval Italy, there are many reports of people purposefully infecting their grains with Ergot fungi and then mixing the results with an alcoholic beverage. This experience would have been close to what LSD feels like.
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The current Prima of Criamon had a master who was deeply into hallucinogens, at least in Sanctuary of Ice. That's why her name is Muscaria. She's named for the fly agaric mushrooms that were used ceremonially in the area.
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Well, hashish (a form of compressed, powdered marijuana, i.e. "weed") does see quite some use in the middle east by the early 13th century. The Nizari muslims apparently get accused in a Cairo pamphlet circulated at the end of the 12th century of being all hashish smokers, and that's where the term assassin comes from.
But if you look to Western Europe, and by "equivalent to smoking weed" you mean use of mildly-to-moderately psychoactive stuff so widespread that a significant portion of the population has at least tried it, and everyone knows about it ... then the one answer is alcoholic beverages. While there are plenty of reported uses of other stuff none of it is nearly as widespread.
Just to add another datapoint: check out Haoma, tCatC p.91.
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Liquor - strong spirits - do not exist in the mundane world. Distilled alcohol for drinking is yet to come. The Order may have some, of course.
That brings up the concept of what some Hermetic herbologist might have developed, but I think you were looking for history, not creativity.
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The answer is cider. Brightly coloured fermented apples - or mostly apples, alcohol with a way of kicking out people's legs from under them.
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This is an excellent observation; let me elaborate on it.
If you produce an alcoholic beverage by fermentation alone, the maximum alcohol content you get is somewhere between 15 and 20%. That's because above this threshold the fermenting agent dies (of alcohol poisoning 
). So to get a higher alcoholic content, you must distill your beverage, removing water from it - in fact, removing it from water.
Now, distillation was well understood by the ancients, and distillation of wine to make something with higher alcohol content by 1220 is known to alchemists (in ArM5 terms, this seems a perfect application of the Natural Alchemy rules in A&A) and indeed described in alchemical texts.
But not only this is pretty expensive stuff - it's just that apparently nobody at the time thinks that making and drinking more powerful alcoholic beverages is a good idea. If your saga follows real history, it will take another century or two for the stuff to catch on. It's worth noting in this sense that ancient Greeks and Romans typically watered down wine before drinking it (barbaric, huh?) and drinking it pure was considered a form of excess.
Part of this may have to do with the fact that "proper" distillation (via stills rather than e.g. via freezing) does more than concentrating alcohol. It removes "bad alcohol" too - in particular methanol and fused alcohols - so you can get more drunk with reduced side effects such as headaches. So it's trickier than one might think to do it just right!
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Alcohol distillation was supposedly invented in the early Middle ages by Arab scientist Al-Kind, and was brought to Europe in the 11th - 12th century.
The theoretical limit on heat distillation is about 95% alcohol. But the practical limit in the Middle Ages would have been significantly lower. Lacking an understanding of the underlying physics of heat and boiling points, good heat control, temperature measurement, or even the ability to observe the behavior of the liquid in the distillation vessel (alembics were ceramic or metal, not transparent glass), an alchemist would be lucky to get better than about a 40 - 50% concentration.
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Medieval alchemists were clever folks. Before the end of the 1200s Taddeo Alderotti (a famous doctor and professor of medicine at the University of Bologna) has already developed (and published) a system involving fractional distillation yielding ethanol in concetrations above 90%!
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Archeologists have found marijuana and pipes in prehistoric sites, so I'd say there is a pretty good chance it was around, though likely an import... marijuana was used medicinally in Ancient Rome and likely persisted into the middle ages, and Charlemagne ordered gardens for medicinal herbs including the poppy, so some form of opium was likely around as well.
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I remember seeing that Franciscans in England were using distilled spirits as the basis for medicine in the 13th century although I'm not sure how early in the century. More or less the precursors to herbal liqueurs or amari but not intended for simply pleasure.
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Decisive in 13th century is the distillation of wine.
In the twelfth century, recipes for the production of aqua ardens ("burning water", i.e., alcohol) by distilling wine with salt started to appear in a number of Latin works, and by the end of the thirteenth century, it had become a widely known substance among Western European chemists.[28] Its medicinal properties were studied by Arnald of Villanova (1240–1311 CE) and John of Rupescissa (c. 1310–1366), the latter of whom regarded it as a life-preserving substance able to prevent all diseases (the aqua vitae or "water of life", also called by John the quintessence of wine).[29]
So with usual conventions, in 1220 an Hermetic lab rat might already appear in the covenant's council chamber somewhat enlightened by the spirits of wine - thereby beating clever Benedictine monks by a century or so.
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12th century would be 1100's, so that should already be in mundane existence, though not common. More of an alchemical formula for philosophical lab work.
Laudanum (opium) was given to sick people, old people & yes, children
Crusaders brought back with them the "secrets" of concocting it in the early 1200's but supply would be hard to come by until later. Hermetic magi have the ability to create it magically.
CrAq(He) 20 - Touch | Mom | Ind | - Laudanum - Ritual
Creates a baril worth (1000 doses) of laudanum of the low quality. The liquid is well known to the gypsies as both medicine and the means to have a grip on local politics. A sip of the liquid will make you go num. Pain fades away, both physical & mental. Roll Stm + die vs 3. Failure means that you slowly fall asleep while a success means that you may do about your business blissfully. A botch might generate a fatal wound or cause some negative health impacts. Each consumption allows you to gain 5xp in the addicted skill. László Borbély Sintis dit le Barbier, currently furnishes the gypsies that are so far from the fertile grounds where the nectar grows in abundance.
(Touch +1 | Mom +0 | Ind +0 | Base 4 (Create poison/water),+0 Quality, +3 Size)
CrAq(He) 30 - Touch | Mom | Ind | - Laudanum Of Liev - Ritual
Creates a baril worth (1000 doses) of laudanum of very good quality. The liquid is well known to the gypsies as both medicine and the means to have a grip on local politics. A sip of the liquid will make you go num. Pain fades away, both physical & mental. Roll Stm + die vs 9. Failure means that you slowly fall asleep while a success means that you may do about your business blissfully. A botch might generate a fatal wound or cause some negative health impacts. Each consumption allows you to gain 5xp in the addicted skill. László Borbély Sintis dit le Barbier, currently furnishes the gypsies that are so far from the fertile grounds where the nectar grows in abundance.
(Touch +1 | Mom +0 | Ind +0 | Base 4 (Create poison that does not wound),+2 Quality, +3 Size)
W
You should be aware that that name is both an exonym and considered a racial slur by many romani