Absinthe, commonly called the green damnation is one of life’s guilty little pleasures. Real absinthe is expensive these days, but so worth the extra money when used for special occasions.
Not so long ago, however, absinthe was considered a deadly drink and governments around the world made attempts to stop the making and the drinking of the green fairy.
Drinking That Kills
An 1888 report out of New York City made the claim that absinthe drinking was “far more destructive to the nervous system than either whisky or opium.” In fact, according to the medical specialists of the time, absinthe was the deadliest of all the drugs commonly available on the streets.
Absinthe drinking was so bad that “a man may smoke opium for years without completely wrecking his mind or body while an absinthe drinker will die or be sent to a lunatic asylum in less than four years.”
What was even more shocking was that over half of the absinthe drinkers in NYC were wealthy and intelligent men and women who, after becoming addicted to the drink, had to go to private resorts to recover from the “deadly” drink. Absinthe was also considered more fatal in NYC than in France because of “climatic conditions,” although this was not further explained. [Source]
The Green Terror Of France
Absinthe enslaved a nation and destroyed its soul, according to an article published in 1901. Labelled as “dangerous” by the Academy of Medicine, the French government was working on passing a bill that would ban the making and sale of the “green terror.”
The French were consuming about 10 million liters of the stuff annually and there was no end in sight to the green trend or the deaths attributed to drinking the stuff. Men of genius were burning “their brains away with the green flame and died miserable deaths.” Women drank it without the knowledge of the effects of alcohol on the fetus and children were being born deformed and partially paralyzed.
Absinthe drinkers were likened to drug addicts in that they needed the drink on a daily basis. Some people would drink it in the morning as a curative for an upset stomach. At lunchtime, it was a picker upper. “Absinthe hour” was between 5 and 7 pm each day, and a glass of it could be had for ten cents at a local café.
The people of France were being destroyed by the drink made from wormwood, according to alarmists. The only way to save them would be for the government to intervene. [Source]
Boarding School Girls
A group of boarding school girls were caught sipping absinthe in San Francisco, 1901, and it must have signaled the end of times because newspapers in the U.S. were once again lashing out at the evils of the green terror.
We are told that the school had tried to hush up the whole event, but word got out. The girls had, at first, taken a sip just for fun, but then they started taking a little more before exams to help “polish their wits.” Finally, one of the sippers became “insane” and was sent to a sanitarium to “escape from the destroying grip of the green terror.”
The name of the boarding school was not released, nor was there any solid proof that the event happened, but, sure enough, other tales of people going insane from the drink were provided without names.
A “leading physician” also chimed in on the evils of the drink, claiming that it caused full body spasms and deadening of the mind to where a person was functioning in a zombie-like state. [Source]
Causes Hair Loss
Aside from medical authorities saying that absinthe drinking caused insanity and the shakes, a humorous claim made in an Australian newspaper, 1868, was that absinthe could make you go bald. Just a bit of the green drink and your hair will fall out. You will also get the look of an absinthe drinker, as the alcohol was said to affect the facial muscles. Extreme weight loss, yellowing skin, and the early formation of wrinkles were other sure tell signs that a person was addicted to absinthe.
The article went on to say that absinthe drinkers experienced “painful hallucinations” and suffered from nightmares. Drinkers experienced “a constant feeling of uneasiness, a painful anxiety, accompanied by sensations of giddiness and tinglings in the ears.”
While most of these symptoms attributed to absinthe sound ridiculous, doctors were incredibly serious about their reports on the effects of this drink. In their minds, there was no other surefire way to become insane and sick looking other than to drink absinthe. [Source]
Race Suicide
You do not need a war to end the “French race.” Just a few million bottles of the stuff would do the trick. An alarmist article published in 1908 declared that absinthe was annihilating the French population, sending them into either the insane asylums or into jails for criminal acts.
There were thousands of absinthe dens within Paris and all of them had loyal customers. In fact, absinthe was so common that when a patron entered, it was automatically assumed that he wanted the green stuff. To ask for anything else was considered odd.
There were also complaints that artisans were only working enough to make money for the drink. Nothing was getting done and France could easily come to a complete standstill if the government did not get people out of the dens and back to work.
While it all seems rather extreme, the reader is assured that this was “a mild picture of the frightful conditions that have grown up in France.” [Source]
Think Of The Children
It is very true that children grow up imitating their parent’s behavior. This is why most adults curb their behavior around small children and, often enough, explain to them that certain things are for adults only. However, cautionary tales showing the evils of absinthe threw good sense to the wind by claiming that a single absinthe drinking parent could destroy the life of a child.
In an alarmist article published in 1873, there were numerous accounts of people who destroyed their lives by drinking absinthe. Some died and some went insane. In one account the claim was made that a child of ten-years-old became an absinthe fiend.
As the story went, the French father would have a glass of the green menace each night before dinner. Sometimes he would allow his young daughter to have a taste of the stuff and she eventually become addicted to it as if it were morphine. The little girl began sneaking sips of the stuff until her complete ruin. The absinthe destroyed her mind and she became a “pitiable spectacle.” [Source]
Absinthism
Instead of calling heavy absinthe drinkers alcoholics, one inventive doctor decided to call the dependence on the green drink absinthism. Dr. Lancereaux went on to categorize absinthe drinkers as having acute absinthism, chronic absinthism, or hereditary absinthism.
But why stop there? It was decided that most of the people of France suffered from hereditary absinthism where parents “transmit a taint to their posterity.” They are difficult to detect in the general population because they never appear to be drunk, but live their lives in tense agitation, silently craving the green menace.
The anti-absinthe doctors were also extremely concerned about the French women who would partake of the green tonic. Unlike the men who made their absinthe with water and sugar cubes, French women usually drank their green fairy pure because they “have not been blessed with too much reasoning power” and because they wore corsets. According to the logic of men, the women could not drink their absinthe with added water and sugar because their corsets did not allow the extra room. [Source]
