Absinthe….Is the “green fairy” safe or harmful?

One of my more interesting jobs was working as a research assistant in the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA while in grad school. Our lab, under the direction of Murray Jarvik and Ron Siegel, looked at the impact of psychoactive substances on learning and memory, which primarily meant giving our poor rhesus monkeys just about every substance under the sun. My impression was that they had no way of understanding what was happening to them, much like people who get an unexpected dose of LSD from school dance punch, and the experience in both cases is typically quite negative.

At the same time, Ron was busy writing a very interesting book on the origin of drug use among humans. After all, it is no easy task to produce something like opium, so how did people learn to do this? While buried deep in the stacks of the UCLA Medical Library reading folklore and other sources, I remember being fascinated with the history of absinthe.

Absinthe, for the uninitiated, is a liquor made of anise (licorice), fennel, and grande wormwood (Artimesia absinthia). Records of the use of wormwood for medicinal purposes go back to early Egyptian papyruses, but the modern version was invented in Switzerland in the 1800s. Absinthe became the rage among Parisien artists and literati of the late 1800s and early 1900s, but concerns about its hallucinogenic and addictive qualities led it to be outlawed in many countries, including the United States, by 1915. Of course, at the outset of WWI, many countries were only just beginning to see how extensive drug use among their population had become, as many draftees were unable to serve due to addiction to then-legal substances. Many American drug laws date from this discovery.

The main component of wormwood, thujone, has been blamed for “absinthism,” a syndrome consisting of hallucination, sleeplessness, and convulsion. Taken in high doses, thujone appears to produce these effects due to its interaction with the inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA, which of course is also heavily influenced by alcohol [1]. 

The toxic nature of wormwood is heavily debated. In a recent analysis of both historical products and recipes for absinthe, Lachenmeier et al. (2006) found very low levels of thujone, and concluded that “absinthism” could have resulted from the excessive alcoholism of the Parisien artists or some adulteration of their food [2].

We know that a person’s expectations (and the rhesus monkey’s lack thereof) can have an enormous impact on their drug experience, hence the need to have double blind experiments to control for placebo effects. One wonders if the Parisiens didn’t get caught up in some type of mass hysteria, where the ritual of absinthe use (with the pretty spoons used to introduct sugar into the mix) didn’t predispose the users to some rather interesting effects.

At any rate, absinthe has been commercially reintroduced into the United States. “Approved” beverages must have thujone levels that are below a cutoff point, which is actually quite a bit higher than the amounts of thujone found in Lachenmeier et al.’s analysis of the historical products.

Are we likely to be sampling absinthe chez Freberg anytime soon? Absolutely not. I’m afraid that one of the side effects of watching my poor rhesus monkeys suffer is that I am a determined abstainer. Yes, I will have an occasional glass of wine when Mr. F is cooking, and I’m notorious for my coffee consumption (20 cups plus a day during grad school), but that’s it. And at my reduced weight (thanks Jenny Craig), I find that half a glass of wine and gasp! about half of my former coffee consumption is all I can handle.

1.  Bielenberg, J. (2007). [Thujone]. Medizinische Monatsschrift für Pharmazeuten, 30, 322-326. (Article in German–fortunately, I can still read if not speak well). 

2.  Lachenmeier, D.W., Emmert, J., Kuballa, T., & Sartor, G. (2006). Thujone–cause of absinthism? Forensic Science International, 158, 1-8.