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whole month free to start any lectures you want. Start your free trial today by going to the Great Courses plus dot com slash brain Stuff. That's the Great Courses plus dot com slash brain Stuff. Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey there, kids, I'm Christian Sager and this is brain stuff. The one that is about the most powerful of liquors absinthe. So in a Swiss vineyard worker named John Lanfrey shot his pregnant wife and
his two daughters. Then he tried to kill himself unsuccessfully. The public were absolutely outraged and blamed the whole thing on two glasses of absinthe that Lanfrey had consumed before his rampage. What is this beverage that could drive a man to such madness? How is it made? Does it actually make you hallucinate as some people claim? Well. Absinthe is an annis flavored alcoholic drink, and for a while there it was banned in the United States, Switzerland, and France.
It tastes kind of like liquorice. People used to call it the green Fairy because it's green and supposedly it made its consumers see things like you know, fairies. The traditional recipe from before the band has a really high alcohol content anywhere from fifty five to seventy, so you're supposed to dilute it when you drink it, unless you've already started the day drinking paint thinner, that is absence made from anis phennel, a plant called wormwood, and a
variety of other herbs and flowers. You soak all these ingredients in alcohol for anywhere from a day to a month. Then you distill the mixture, causing it to evaporate and leave behind bitter essences. You then recondense these with the alcohol as it cools and dilutes. Manufactures add more herbs later to give it the milky greenish color that it's known for. It gets it the roma from the wormwood, something like a mix of cinnamon and clothes. But don't go buying this stuff out of the trunk of a
stranger's car. Falsified absinthe is typically made with industrial alcohol, food dye, antimony, and copper salts. With that combination, you might as well just stick with the paint thinner. But the vintage absinthe from before the band that stuff can go for as much as five hundred dollars for three ounce vial, or ten thousand dollars for an entire bottle. Wormwood has been used medicinally since fifteen fifty two BC in Egypt. It's bitter taste is so old it's actually
mentioned in the Bible as a representation of injustice. It was used as a general remedy for disease in the Middle Ages, and get this, Mothers used to apply it to their nipples to wean their babies off of breast milk. In the eighteenth century, a French physician is rumored to
have developed the absinthe recipe with wormwood. This recipe was first commercially produced in seventeen seven by Henri Louis Pernode, and a century later it was incredibly popular because a vine pest had made wine less available and people needed to get their drink on. Simultaneously, an anti alcohol movement was growing, called for by both doctors, the clergy and
the wine growers who wanted their industry back. The growers started a misinformation campaign linking absinthe to hallucinations, seizures, suicides, and murders like those committed by Lanfrey. They even produced posters denouncing addiction to the drink as absinthe is m Recent studies however, have shown that if there was a
real problem, it was actually widespread alcoholism that was to blame. Remember, absinthe has an incredibly high concentration of alcohol in it, and at the time it was one the most highly consumed drinks in France, so the two went hand in hand. But the scientists of the time, perhaps misguided by absintheism propaganda,
missed this inter relationship. Instead, they performed experiments on animals to prove that wormwood was at fault, and rather than use absinthe in their tests, they use essence to absinthe, which is essentially pure wormwood oil. They shut guinea pigs up with saucers of absinthe and alcohol, testing the effects as the animals huffed in the fumes. They even made lesions in the brains and spinal cords of cats so
they could administer wormwood directly. Guess what, When you cut up a cat and rub wormwood oil on its bare brain, it has seizures. Seeing this as a confirmation of their hypotheses, their results were assumed to have the same effect on the humans who drank commercial absinthe. Now here's the thing. There's a component in wormwood called fo jone that in
high doses can be toxic. We used to think that it suppressed neurotransmitters in the brain, but it's actually a gamma amino betric acid inhibitor, meaning it blocks the brains GABBA receptors. This causes convulsions. Food jone occurs naturally in a lot of different foods, but never in doses that are high enough to hurt you, and this includes absinthe. Even with the variation in its alcohol levels, by the time the drink is distilled, there's barely any food jone left.
There are different chemotypes of food jone two, and not all of them have the same toxicological effects. And furthermore, any effects felt under the influence of absinthe were in conjunction with the intoxicating depressant of the ethanol that's also in the drink. Examination of historic absinthe products has determined that they actually had about the same food jone in them as today's maximum limits will allow, meaning they weren't
toxic but did absent to make people hallucinate. It's unlikely, but if it did, it was probably caused by the ethanol content and not the thoo jone in the wormwood. The absentthe available today in Europe has less ethanol and a legal food jone content a thirty five milligrams per leader. Most brands have the same ingredients and extracts as absinthe from before the band they simply monitor the thoo jone. Since two thousand seven, modern absinthe can only be sold
in the United States if it's through jone free. If it has wormwood in it, the f d A considers it adulterated. But honestly, you could probably get away with bringing a bottle or two into the country in your suitcase. And if you're looking to hallucinate with the Green Fairy, there is no evidence that absinthe, even with high doses of thoo jone, will get you there. Frankly, you'd probably die from alcohol poisoning well before you felt any effects
from the thoo jone. It's possible that the constituents in wormwood or other absent ingredients may cause health problems, but so far there is no evidence. So don't let advertisements fool you that absinthe will have any psychotropic effects. That's just marketing trying to cash in on the beverage's past reputation. Oh, and for the record, when John Lanfrey killed his family, he had a lot more to drink than absent. He also had about thirteen glasses of wine, six cognacs, two
copies full of brandy, and a Creme de men. Check out the brain Stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.