Absinthe, nicknamed ‘la fée verte, or the ‘green fairy’ due to its electric colour, is alcoholic spirit distilled from fermented sugar beet or grape juice, flavoured with green anise and infused with aromatic herbs and spices.
There has always been a mythology around absinthe, highlighted by its place in popular culture featuring in paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, Manet, and Picasso; and in literature. Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘After the first glass you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world’.
Can Absinthe Cause Hallucinations?
Absinthe has long had the reputation of making drinkers hallucinate. But is it true? Possibly if you drank gallons of it although you’d probably die of alcohol poisoning before you saw green fairies, but mostly no.
One of absinthe’s ingredients is wormwood with the Latin name Artemisia absinthium, the latter word derived from Greek apsinthion which meant undrinkable. Wormwood is a bitter tasting botanical that contains a compound called thujone.
In the late 19th century an influential French psychiatrist (Valentin Magnan) studied the effects of thujone by force-feeding pure wormwood oil to lab animals which suffered powerful convulsions before dying. Such high levels of thujone are not present in absinthe but the erroneous belief that wormwood was dangerous was reinforced by heavy drinkers of absinthe suffering seizures and hallucinations. At the time the alcohol content of absinthe was 60-90% ABV (nowadays it is likely to be lower) and some unscrupulous producers would add certain ingredients to reduce production costs that were poisonous in high doses.
Absinthism
Absinthe was blamed for the physical and psychological effects suffered by some drinkers and labelled as a syndrome called absinthism. This, along with the political influence of temperance movements, led in the 19th and 20th centuries to absinthe being banned in several countries around the world (but never in Britain).
All the symptoms of absinthism are the same as those of chronic alcohol abuse. Alcohol in absinthe not wormwood/thujone was the culprit.
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Thank you to Randy Fath for the fabulous photo above which I downloaded from Unsplash.
