Absinthesis

Questions

Does absinthe make you hallucinate?

No. The idea goes back to the 1860s and to experiments on dogs, and it fell apart when scientists finally tested real absinthe from before the bans.

By Bryen Beglinger

Newspaper magazine cover headlined Is San Francisco in the Grip of the Green Terror, showing a man in a chair wrapped by a huge serpent
The San Francisco Call, January 20, 1901: absinthe drawn as a serpent coiled around a drinker.The San Francisco Call, Sunday magazine section, January 20, 1901, page 1. Library of Congress, Chronicling America.

Where the idea came from

Valentin Magnan, a doctor at a Paris asylum, gave a name to the disease he blamed on the drink: "absinthism." His evidence was animal work. He reported that 10 to 15 centigrams of essence of wormwood, injected into a vein of a 12 kilogram dog, brought on an epileptic fit. Nobody drinking absinthe at a café ever took a dose like that, and nobody took it straight into the blood.

Newspapers did the rest. By 1901 an American paper was drawing absinthe as a green serpent, eleven years before the United States banned it.

What the bottles showed

In 2008 a team led by Dirk Lachenmeier at a German state laboratory analyzed thirteen absinthes from sealed bottles made before the bans. Thujone, the wormwood compound everyone blamed, ran from 0.5 to 48.3 milligrams per liter, about 25 on average. That is about what absinthe made today contains. The team wrote that "nothing besides ethanol was found in the absinthes that was able to explain the syndrome 'absinthism.'"

So the drinkers Magnan saw were suffering from very strong alcohol, drunk every day. Absinthe was often bottled well above 60 percent.

Why the labels still say so little

The US rule that let absinthe back in 2007 still bars any label art suggesting hallucinogenic or mind altering effects. The full rule is on Is absinthe legal in the United States?, and the whole case against the drink, year by year, is in Wormwood on trial.

Sources

  1. D. W. Lachenmeier and others, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2008. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  2. ScienceDaily, report on the Lachenmeier study, April 29, 2008. sciencedaily.com
  3. Valentin Magnan's dog experiments and the 1901 San Francisco Call, as cited in Wormwood on trial.
  4. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, Industry Circular 2007-5, October 16, 2007. ttb.gov