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[GiglameshDespair]

But that link says modern absinthe still contains it, just normally at lower levels.

Absinthe itself isn't the health threat it used to be, said postdoc Nilantha Sirisoma. Still banned in some countries but easily available over the Internet, today's version of the emerald-green alcoholic beverage tends to have very low alpha-thujone levels, although there is a great variation among brands and home brew can be particularly dangerous.

[Reelya]

They've artificially removed the toxic compound. They brought that back in the 1990's after it was banned about 100 years ago. So it's basically marketing and has no real link to the 19th century drink.

Some studies claim the bad effects of 19th century absinthe were made up. But other modern studies focusing on the active compound show that it causes neurological effects exactly like those claimed in the 19th century. That can't just be a coincidence.

[Avis-Mergulus]

Excuse me, but nope. It was banned in the beginning of the 19th century as a result of a moral panic because it was a rather cheaply available drink in France at the time. For the tujone in it to have any effect, you'd have to consume so much that you'd get alcohol poisoning first. And modern double-distilled absinthe, sold in liquor stores everywhere, is "real absinthe" - or even better, because the version poor Frenchmen drank was made for cheap and without much care for quality. But the problems it caused were just shitty alcohol problems, anyway.
Wikipedia will tell you all this and more in the span of a few pages. I can link you several studies about absinthe toxicity wich conclude it is about zero.

Absinthe has often been portrayed as a dangerously addictive psychoactive drug and hallucinogen.[8] The chemical compound thujone, although present in the spirit in only trace amounts, was blamed for its alleged harmful effects. By 1915, absinthe had been banned in the United States and in much of Europe, including France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary. Although absinthe was vilified, it has not been demonstrated to be any more dangerous than ordinary spirits. Recent studies have shown that absinthe's psychoactive properties (apart from that of the alcohol) have been exaggerated.

Tl;dr: absinthe was hip and edgy drink, so edgy it got banned. Actually not edgy at all.

E: ninja'd. Actually, the array of effects it was claimed to cause in the 19th century was so broad that they were bound to hit a few times, especially since a lot of them are very similar to the effects of, you know, ethanol. But whatever, I may be wrong. Anyway, the consumption of one small glass of absinthe, real or not, will not cause you to flip your shit.

[wobbly]

E: ninja'd. Actually, the array of effects it was claimed to cause in the 19th century was so broad that they were bound to hit a few times, especially since a lot of them are very similar to the effects of, you know, ethanol. But whatever, I may be wrong. Anyway, the consumption of one small glass of absinthe, real or not, will not cause you to flip your shit.

Though if it's a small glass as in say about 200mls rather then a shot & it's say around 70% ethanol it's certainly going to make you pretty drunk.

[Reelya]

idk, some of the latest research on thujone levels in preserved bottles is pretty high, even by modern standards, and it's a compound which decays really fast on top of that. For example researchers who've experimented with using commerical dried wormwood and traditional recipes basically get no thujone in the drink at all, because almost all the thujone breaks down in a few months. Then they claim that traditional absinthe would have had the same low levels. But this is easily disproved just by checking the thujone levels in preserved bottles, which is much higher. So researchers who are trying to downplay the amount of thujone in archaic absinthe seem to be resorting to a number of perversions of logic and common sense. That makes me suspicious.

https://www.erowid.org/plants/wormwood/wormwood_article1.shtml

A group of scientists studied a whole pile of 100 year old bottles and found median thujone concentrations of 33mg/L which is right on the modern legal limit. The highest sample was 48mg/L. But that's just by checking a few surviving bottles, so the sample is unlikely to have anything close to the strongest one that existed. Also, since the stuff is so unstable, that's probably a mere fraction of what it had when it was bottled. If we assume 2/3rds of the thujone degraded over a century, then the original would have had 100mg/L, and that's a pretty conservative estimate for the rate of degradation of this stuff, given that just drying wormwood degrades 90% of it in just a few months. The established levels of absinthe in known 100 year old bottles combined with the decay rates make it highly likely that there were significantly higher amounts of thujone in 19th century absinthe. 200mg/L or more in some bottles of the original would not be unlikely.

And you can see in the article linked that people trying to downplay the toxicity of 19th century absinthe have used some very dubious logic:

Lachenmeier and Nathan-Maister, who express a preference for less bitter, clear absinthes, consider high-thujone absinthes to be "unauthentic". However, a bias is revealed in their statement that one of the types of wormwood they used is "obviously thujone-free and, therefore, ideally suited to produce absinthe with wormwood quantities on the basis of the traditional recipes, without the producer facing the risk of exceeding the thujone limit." There is no indication that a traditional absinthe producer would have used contemporary thujone restrictions as a criteria in selecting wormwood.

[Dutchling]

I seem to be not dying. So that's good.

Yay for modern medicine!


Still fatigued like a dwarf that's spent three days trying to choke a skeleton though.

What happened, if you don't mind me asking?

might be Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

[GiglameshDespair]

XCOM2 announced!

[Helgoland]

A group of scientists studied a whole pile of 100 year old bottles and found median thujone concentrations of 33mg/L which is right on the modern legal limit. The highest sample was 48mg/L. But that's just by checking a few surviving bottles, so the sample is unlikely to have anything close to the strongest one that existed. Also, since the stuff is so unstable, that's probably a mere fraction of what it had when it was bottled. If we assume 2/3rds of the thujone degraded over a century, then the original would have had 100mg/L, and that's a pretty conservative estimate for the rate of degradation of this stuff, given that just drying wormwood degrades 90% of it in just a few months. The established levels of absinthe in known 100 year old bottles combined with the decay rates make it highly likely that there were significantly higher amounts of thujone in 19th century absinthe. 200mg/L or more in some bottles of the original would not be unlikely.

That's a horrible approximation. You're comparing decay levels in wood, exposed to oxygen, moisture, temperature oscillations etc etc to decay levels in highly-concentrated alcohol, in the dark, under exclusion of air.
Take, for example, LSD: By your logic, I could say "Blotters left lying about for a couple days are barely active, so these blotters from '71 I found in a vacuum-sealed bag in my granny's fridge must be shit." The conclusion may be true, but the logic is not sound at all.

[Avis-Mergulus]

-snip-

Hmm. While I'm still not entirely convinced, I'll admit that this somewhere in the region of sensible and I can't be bothered to read more material right now to reach a satisfactory conclusion.
Still, can we at least agree that a glass of absinthe, whether modern or historical, can't really induce a state of depressive-looking self-portrait drawing unless somebody's trying to be way super-duper edgy and whatnot? I mean, I understand that the drugs were probably mostly used as an inspiration and not for all the stimuli, but come on. It's a single glass of absinthe. Can't you hold your tujone-flavored booze, emo kid?

[Yoink]

I don't know who to believe.
Is absinthe gonna get me gloriously fucked up, or am I better off just saving money and drinking your garden variety spirits?

[Dutchling]

go to church yoink

find jesus

[Yoink]

is he between the couch cushions

that's where he was last time

[wobbly]

Your church has couches? I'm changing churches.

[Rolan7]

[Do you go to my church?]
(Liberal Crime Squad)

[Owlga]

Oh shit new xcom. All boners on full. And it comes out in November, that's plenty of time to drag gunner-chan along in a drunken nostalgia boner trip.

Hype!