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Absinthe the drink

Wormwood, or absinthe to give it the French name by which it became notorious, developed its diabolical glamour directly from its medical use as a vermicide and anti-malarial. Absinthe retained a standard role as part of the herbal pharmacopoeia until after the French Revolution, when the restored Bourbon monarchy needed to enhance its prestige in its short reign, and this took the form of colonial expeditions. One of these, in 1830, was against Algeria, and achieved complete success in three weeks, laying the foundation for the French North African Empire.

Initial conquests of Algiers, Oran and Bone led to a gradual extension of French territory, until in 1839 an Arab chief, Abd-el-Kader, led resistance against them. It took an army of 88,000 years of campaigning in a barbarous war before Abd-el-Kader was defeated and captured in 1847.

French soldiers, unaccustomed to fighting in African conditions, suffered from all the ills the continent had to offer. ‘Fever made grievous havoc in the ranks of the army,’ and doctors recommended absinthe in place of quinine, which was too costly to be generally distributed. Absinthe had long been used as an insecticide, to be rubbed on the skin or placed in stored clothes to guard against insects. To ward off dysentery, African Battalion soldiers were issued with absinthe to put in their unhealthy drinking water, which probably had something of the desired effect, as it causes roundworms to loosen their grip, allowing them to be defecated from the body.

Bitter water, however supposedly hygienic, was not palatable, and the soldiers took to spiking their wine with absinthe (facilitated by the large amounts of wild wormwood growing in Algeria), thus creating a more strongly alcoholic drink. Absinthe then went with the French on all their foreign campaigns, to such insalubrious climes as Madagascar and Indo-China. When they returned home, they took this acquired taste for bitter-flavoured alcohol back to the cafes of France, calling for ‘une verte’, in reference to the drink’s green colour before water is added.

Effects of absinthe

Inevitably, some do-it-yourself practitioners discovered why absinthe has a reputation as a dangerous substance. The New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 carried a report titled ‘poison on line – acute renal failure caused by oil of wormwood purchased through the internet’. It described the case of a 31-year-old man who was found at home by his father in an agitated, incoherent and disoriented state. He was taken to hospital, where int the emergency room he was lethargic but belligerent. His mental status improved after treatment with haloperidol, and he reported finding a description of absinthe on the Internet. Finding another site offering essential oils used in aromatherapy, the man purchased a 10ml bottle of oil of wormwood and drank it, on the assumption that oil of wormwood was the same as absinthe when in fact it is a concentrated form of one of the drink’s ingredients.

His incoherent state when he was found by his father was due to acute renal failure, which is commonly caused by injury, seizures, infections and drugs. The man recovered after eight days in the hospital, and was clear of the toxic effects of his encounter with wormwood after 17 days.

Wormwood

Wormwood fell as a star from the sky, flaming like a torch to poison the rivers and springs, ‘and men in great numbers died from its bitterness’, The description from Revelation gives some idea of the power attributed to the basic constituent of absinthe.

The righteous are further warned to beware the adulteress, as the writers of Proverbs testify, for though her lips drip honey and her tongue is smoother than oil, ultimately she is more bitter than wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. The judgement of God for apostasy is like being fed with the plant; only such terrible experiences as the loss of Jerusalem can be described by this awful bitterness: to be fed on ashes, racked with pain, ‘drunk with wormwood’.

Wormwood, therefore, has long had what would come to be called a bad press, but it had its many uses, as the frequent references to it in ancient times attest. The Ebers papyrus, and Egyptian compilation of seven hundred medical texts dating from around 1550 BC, includes advice on the use of wormwood as an antiseptic and as valuable against worms, fevers and period pains.

Thujone

Detailed research was carried out in 2002 by Ian Hutton, who scorns the high figures for thujone, noting that analytical techniques available in the nineteenth century were not capable of separating thujone from the related compounds present in the essential oils used to make absinthe. Hutton, of the company Liqueurs of France, subjected samples of old and new absinthes to gas chromatography to analyse their chemical make-up. He took vintage Pernod fils from 1900, a sample of absinthe made from an illicit still in Switzerland, and two modern commercial products. The vintage absinthe has six parts per million of thujone, the commercial products eight and ten. The illicit Swiss absinthe had 25 parts per million. Hutton remarked that ‘even at the highest concentrations found in any of the samples tested, the effects of alcohol would far outweigh those of the thujone’. He supports the view, always held by absinthe industry experts in the nineteenth century, that the health problems experienced by chronic users were likely to have been caused by adulterants in inferior brands.

Historical absintheurs

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, young Europeans and Americans flooded into historic Prague to enjoy the experience of newly liberated eastern Europe. Not surprisingly, given the two-minute culture of the twentieth century fin-de-siècle, the bohemian avant garde in the 1990s comprised not authors and painters but popular musicians and magazine writers, several of whom can claim the rediscovery of absinthe. The rock band the Sugar Cubes, best known for their lead singer Björk, visited Prague as a promotional gesture, as the city was said to be the place where the first sugar cube was made. An obvious local photo opportunity was to picture the band with the traditional Czech method of drinking absinthe: dipping a cube of sugar on a spoon into the undiluted absinthe, setting it alight then stirring it into the absinthe in the glass while adding just enough water to douse the flames. The Sugar Cubes took the drink to the thriving club culture of Iceland, where it was recognized as a fascinating new trend by the many British young people who visited the scene in Reykjavik.