Absinthe: It just made artists really really drunk
In December, I wrote a story about absinthe, which had recently become available in Boston. Since 1912, there had been an effective ban on it, due to a substance called thujone. Thujone, found in the grand wormwood used to make absinthe, was said to be hallucinogenic and/or harmful, something modern-day absinthe experts and chemical researchers take issue with. Absinthe, nicknamed "la Fee Verte" (the green fairy), was favored in fin de siecle France, where the likes of Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Van Gogh imbibed it freely.
In the story, I quoted Dirk Lachenmeier, a scientist at the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Laboratory of Karlsruhe in Germany who has studied absinthe extensively. "To my knowledge, a hallucinogenic potential . . . was never proven for thujone in any concentration," he said via e-mail. "The only proven effects are seizures (like epileptic fits) if thujone is ingested in high concentrations (unreachable with absinthe)."
Now Lachenmeier and his fellow researchers have analyzed 13 bottles of absinthe from the early 1900s, before the drink was banned. Their results are here and will appear in the May 14 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
To sum up: Pre-ban absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, compared with the average vodka, gin, or whiskey's 40-50 percent. The study found relatively little thujone, about the same amounts as appear in modern absinthe. Those creative artists weren't hallucinating, they were just drunk.
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"Now Lachenmeier and his fellow researchers"
Who were his fellow researchers exactly? The science is flawed as they conveniently dismiss the notion that this terpene thujone would remain unchanged over a period of +100 years. This is clearly a paper inspired by modern day commercial and regulatory concerns.
See: Karin M. H�ld, Nilantha S. Sirisoma, and John E. Casida
www.sciencenews.org/articles/20000401/fob4.asp
An alternate viewpoint -- the nature of thujone has been hotly debated.
Lachenmeier's fellow researchers are also scientists at the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Laboratory of Karlsruhe.
Check out this video of a talk show host drinking absinthe. It didn't take her very long to start feeling it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8R2J24y_yw&eurl=http://wbal.com/stories/templates/elliker_show.aspx?articleid=5583&zoneid=11
That's pretty funny. I can't tell if the camera crew was chugging the absinthe, too, or if they just thought it was hilarious how quickly the host got tipsy.
The full text of article can be accessed for free at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jf703568f (open access).
The researchers and affiliations are clearly shown.
We dealt with the degradation of thujone on page 6. As previous studies had shown (see e.g. Refs. 14&24), thujone in ethanolic solutions under the typical storage conditions is very stable.
The Höld et al. paper is interesting but did contain neither information on thujone in pre-ban absinthe nor insight into the degredation of thujone. Höld et al. researched the toxicology and metabolism of thujone under the assumption that it was "the active ingredient in absinthe," which is not the case, as we have now clearly proven.
This blogger might want to review your comment before posting it.
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