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The Return of Absinthe

Westy

Westy

the teste
Nov 22, 2002
54,523
20,330
Sleazattle
I love it how people who have drank the fake absinthe think they have had some strange psychological experience when it has only been alcohol and the power of suggestion.
 
syadasti

syadasti

i heart mac
Apr 15, 2002
12,690
290
VT
Westy said:
I love it how people who have drank the fake absinthe think they have had some strange psychological experience when it has only been alcohol and the power of suggestion.
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Yeah fake/control doses can do that - sugar, alcohol, whatever :monkey:
 
narlus

narlus

Eastcoast Softcore
Staff member
Nov 7, 2001
24,658
63
behind the viewfinder
Westy said:
I love it how people who have drank the fake absinthe think they have had some strange psychological experience when it has only been alcohol and the power of suggestion.
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maybe thujone is also subject to this placebo effect:

http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/food/articles/2007/12/05/green_light/

There have been no hallucinations, no scrawled sonnets of unparalleled beauty, no murderous urges. I do feel oddly amped, though. All night I have extremely lucid dreams (guess that explains the name) involving detailed but mundane conversations with people I haven't spoken to in years. In the morning I find I'm wearing different pajamas than the ones I went to bed in. A drinking companion tells me he made a snack when he got home but realized when he woke up that he'd never eaten it. Was this thujone at work?
Absinthe absinthe (ab' sinth') n. 1 A green spirit made with grand wormwood. 2 A drink beloved by Belle Epoque bohemians. 3 A source of inspiration for figures from Van Gogh to Hemingway. 4 A potion said by some to cause hallucinations, delirium, insanity. 5 A substance once effectively banned now being poured in Boston.

More likely it was alcohol. "The whole thujone thing is ridiculous," says T.A. Breaux, the man who created Lucid, along with other absinthes. Breaux knows perhaps more than anyone else alive about making the spirit - his quest to distill historically accurate absinthe was chronicled in The New Yorker and Wired, among other publications.

"The theory that absinthe causes hallucinations was just exaggerated. There was no absinthe around, so people speculated. I've tested absinthes from the 1800s. Vintage absinthe contained about 10 percent of the thujone that was originally theorized. Vintage absinthes could be called low thujone - they were."

Dirk Lachenmeier, a scientist at the German food surveillance laboratory CVUA Karlsruhe, has studied absinthe extensively and concurs with Breaux. "To my knowledge, a hallucinogenic potential . . . was never proven for thujone in any concentration," he says via e-mail. "The only proven effects are seizures (like epileptic fits) if thujone is ingested in high concentrations (unreachable with absinthe). The limits are certainly justified to prevent potentially toxic thujone concentrations from reaching the food chain. The main human exposure for thujone is not absinthe but sage-derived products (sage filling in turkeys, etc.)."
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