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By Frank Swigonski
June 22, 2013
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Absinthe is a grain alcohol of Swiss origin that is made by macerating herbs and spices, the most important of which are fennel, anise, and wormwood. The first two give absinthe its characteristic licorice flavor. Wormwood imparts a bitter flavor and is the source of absinthe’s famed mystique and jade-green hue.
Absinthe is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and, until recently, was completely banned in the U.S. and most of Europe. The reason for this is that absinthe contains thujone, a toxic chemical found in several edible plants including tarragon, sage, and wormwood. Why is thujone so dangerous that its presence in your glass of booze needs to be regulated by the FDA? The answer has more to do with history than science.
Prior to the ban in the early 1900s, absinthe was ubiquitous. If you check out a list of famous people who drank absinthe, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of them. That’s because basically everyone who was cool between 1850 and 1900 drank it. Being both the latest fad in booze and extremely high in alcohol content, absinthe was sometimes to blame for bouts of raging drunkenness, occasional delirium, and even death. Kind of like Four Loko today.
As its popularity spread, incidents of absinthe-related alcohol abuse spread as well. Society gradually came to associate absinthe with alcoholism and degeneracy in general. A French psychiatrist named Dr. Valentin Magnan even went so far as to blame absinthe for what he saw as a collapse of French culture.
Dr. Magnan set out to prove through scientific experiment that absinthe was the root of French society’s ills. He conducted all sorts of scientific experiments on animals using thujone and wormwood oil. He observed that mice that ingested high concentrations of thujone had convulsions and died. He even gave a dog a vial of wormwood oil and watched it go crazy and bark at a brick wall for half an hour. (This experiment, by the way, is the root of the myth that absinthe causes hallucinations. It doesn’t.)
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https://www.mic.com/articles/50301/why-was-absinthe-banned-for-100-years-a-mystery-as-murky-as-the-liquor-itself
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