Greenland Whale Fisheries

There's an article concerning absinthe in the March 13th, 2006 New Yorker. In it, the writer Jack Turner, author of Spice: The History of a Temptation (which I presume concerns the salt-and-pepper-and-nutmeg type of spice, as opposed to pay-per-view porn), hangs around with a guy from New Orleans who is attempting to distill and create "authentic" absinthe in France.

The suggestion is made in the article that the public outrage against absinthe in the later half of the 19th century had more to do with a limited understanding of alcoholism at the time. That is, that absinthe (more so than other alcohols, like amaretto or wine) was seen as the cause or source of what might be more rightly attributed to symptoms of alcoholism -- dementia, tremors, etc. (This raises the possibility that all of the drum-beating for Temperance and, ultimately, Prohibition in this country was due to seeing alcohol itself as the root source of alcoholism as opposed to the understanding we tend to have today, that alcohol dependency is rooted -- at least in part -- in the person. ) Turner raises the possibility that absinthe is no more or less harmful than other liquors.

So what about the wormwood and the thujone?
Thujone is a chemical structure within wormwood which has been thought to give absinthe its rumored psycho-active effects. The fellow whom Turner follows -- I would give his name but I don't have the article at hand -- says that as he became more interested in absinthe he did chemical analysis on some hard-to-find pre-ban absinthe -- i.e., absinthe that was produced before nearly-worldwide bans on it in the 1910's -- and found no evidence of thujone. In his own distilling of absinthe, thujone did not distill into the liquor but was left in the pot with all of the wormwood, additives, etc.

Turner's subject implies that most absinthe currently produced includes thujone as an additive, rather than as a product of distillation and that the "real" absinthe which Tolousse-Latrec fed his parrot, and which Hemingway sipped in Paris, wouldn't have had any thujone in it.