DOES ABSINTHE MAKE YOU HALLUCINATE REDDIT FULL
Another guinea-pig was similarly shut up with a saucer full of pure alcohol. These gentlemen placed a guinea-pig under a glass case with a saucer full of essence of wormwood (which is one of the flavouring matters of absinthe) by his side. The question whether absinthe exerts any special action other than that of alcohol in general, has been revived by some experiments by MM. The British medical journals seemed to agree that absinthe was highly dangerous, citing this strange experiment from 1869:
The irony of the history here is that it was precisely the dire warnings, first issued in French medical journals in the mid 19th century, that created the vast demand for absinthe all over Europe and America. However, with that change, some of the cachet has been drained away from this yummy drink, which, as it turns out, is just a drink like any other: if you drink too much, you get drunk. Fortunately you can, because your right to drink the stuff has been restored. Kind of makes you want to go out and buy a bottle right now. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad. If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you’d be frightened, or you’d laugh. But you don’t because you associate it with other things and ideas. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. After the second you see them as they are not. Now there are micro-distilleries all over the country that make the real thing, the exact drink about which Oscar Wilde wrote:Īfter the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. But get this (which you probably already know but I did not): it was relegalized for import into the United States in 2007. What about the belief that it was banned? It was indeed banned, over most of the Western world since the late 19th century. Wormwood has been used as a medicinal herb since the ancient world, and there is a great deal of legend surrounding the stuff, but there is zero evidence that it has any hallucinogenic properties at all! It turns out that I was the victim of a 100-year old moral panic about wormwood that has absolutely no basis in fact at all.
Then I became worried that something terrible or wonderful was about to happen to me, that I would see green fairies, hallucinate that I was floating, and maybe cut off my ear. Sure enough, he was right! Printed right on the label was the word. I grabbed the bottle and looked at the ingredients. My friend, the economist George Selgin, said “This has wormwood in it just like the absinthe from the old days!”
“This is delicious but wouldn’t it be great if the original recipe with wormwood were legal again?” I was sitting in a living room drinking absinthe with friends, and I said in passing something like: Albert Maignan-La muse verte Poet succumbs to the green fairy
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