Tja, det där är en fördom som lever kvar sedan det förbjöds. Man tar skada av alkoholen långt innan thujonet skulle ha någon sådan effekt. Och du har saker på kryddhyllan som innehåller lika mycket... salvia skall du definitivt inte äta. :wink:
Och inget malörtsbrännvin, Wermouth, gammeldansk eller bitter...
Däremot är det förståeligt att det förbjöds när en stor del av befolkningen regelbundet drack 70%-ig sprit - och en del drack väldigt mycket av det. Att man tar skada av det är självklart, men det spelar ingen roll vilken sorts 70%-ig sprit man drar i sig.
Absinthe hit its peak during the years from 1880-1910. It was a quintessential part of Belle Epoque French society. The French consumed far more absinthe than any other country, and absinthe drinking was one of the special marks of Paris in the 1890s and early 1900?s. Absinthe was a symbol of inspiration and daring, and became indelibly associated with the bohemian artists and writers who were revolutionising art and literature. Many famous works of art were directly inspired by the drink, including some of Degas? and Van Gogh greatest masterpieces, and the very first cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque. EVERYONE drank absinthe ? society ladies, gentlemen-about-town, businessmen and politicians, artists, musicians, ordinary working-men. In 1874 alone, France consumed 700,000 litres of absinthe, but by 1910, this figure had exploded to 36,000,000 litres of absinthe per year. That sounds like a whole lot, but it actually accounted for only 3% of the total french alcohol consumption, whilst wine had 72% of the total. The french drank a lot! So, why was absinthe banned? Absinthe was originally fairly expensive, and largely a drink of the upper-middle classes. However, by the second half of the nineteenth century it had fallen dramatically in price, both because of increasing economies of scale in its production, and because most producers had switched from grape alcohol to far cheaper grain and beet alcohols. At the same time the number of brands exploded, with many catering for the very cheapest end of the market. Absinthe became increasingly popular amongst all classes of French society, and began to displace wine as the standard drink of the French working class. During this period the French wine industry was struggling with the crippling effects of both oidium (a kind of mildew) and phyloxera (an incurable beetle infestation deadly to vines). Almost all the French national vineyard had to be replanted, a process that took decades and resulted in a prolonged shortage of wine, and a consequent rise in wine prices. Increasingly, absinthe was the affordable, and far more alcoholic, alternative to wine. This was both a major reason for its enormous popularity, and ultimately the root cause of its downfall. When the wine industry began to recover in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the politically well-connected grape growers, seeking to recover the market share they had lost, began to agitate for the prohibition of what they termed ?unnatural? products like absinthe. In the 1880's, there was for the first time concern about the results of chronic abuse of absinthe. Chronic use of absinthe was believed to produce a syndrome, called absinthism, which was characterized by addiction, hyperexcitability, and hallucinations. The science, or pseudo-science behind these reports was dubious and often obviously flawed ? but the reports were published in the popular press of the day and widely believed. It is now thought that the symptoms of ?absinthism? were due primarily to the effects of the alcohol itself, and also perhaps to the many sometimes extremely dangerous chemical adulterants used in cheap absinthes of the time. Well-made absinthes used chlorophylic colouration from herbs to achieve their characteristic green colour. This however was an expensive and difficult to control process, so unscrupulous low cost producers substituted chemicals such as copper sulphate to achieve the same effect. Antimony chloride ? another highly poisonous substance - was also used to help the drink become cloudy when added to water. During the late 19th & early 20th centuries France, together with many western countries, was under pressure from various temperance movements and their constituents to curb alcohol consumption on a governmental level as it was seen to morally corrupt its citizens. In the midst of this prohibitionist excitement, the word "absinthism" came to lose its specific meaning. Absinthism and alcoholism were confused, and an alcoholic was simply deemed an "absinthe drinker". This confusion of meaning seems to have been deliberately encouraged by the prohibitionist movement. Wine was believed to be healthy and natural, since it came from the land and was a time-honored tradition, not to mention a major source of revenue. Absinthe, however, was made with industrial alcohol, and was moreover by far the most alcoholic of all liquors. It?s not surprising, that by the 1890?s, absinthe had become the primary target for the French temperance movement. This narrow focus on absinthe was of course entirely in the interests of the powerful wine industry lobby. After all, under the growing threat of Prohibition, how better to draw attention away from your own alcoholic product ?wine - than to make people believe that it is the healthy, natural exception to the "bad" rule? Adding to the political agitation against absinthe was its popularity not just with the working class, but also with the radical bohemian set ? young artists like Van Gogh and Toulouse Lautrec, writers like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, to name just a few. Their scandalous lifestyles and debauched behaviour shocked and outraged the establishment, and absinthe, their favourite drink, came to encapsulate in the public mind everything that had gone wrong with conservative France. Like a vice slowly tightening, the pressure to ban absinthe inexorably increased. The last straw was a series of particularly brutal family murders which were ? largely unfairly ? blamed on absinthe consumption. The most notorious of these was the celebrated Lanfray case, which riveted the European press in 1905. Jean Lanfray, a Swiss peasant of French stock, having drunk two glasses of absinthe, shot his pregnant wife and two daughters, before attempting to kill himself. He failed, and was found the next morning collapsed across their dead bodies. Public reaction to the case was extraordinary, and it focused on just one detail ? the two glasses of absinthe he had drunk beforehand. Forgotten was the fact that Lanfray was a thoroughgoing alcoholic who habitually drank up to 5 litres of wine a day. Forgotten also, was that on the day of the attack he had consumed not only the two absinthes before going to work ? hours before the tragedy ? but also a crème de menthe, a cognac, six glasses of wine to help his lunch down, another glass of wine before leaving work, a cup of coffee with brandy in it, an entire litre of wine on getting home, and then another coffee with marc in it. People were in no doubt. It must have been the absinthe that did it. Within weeks, a petition demanding that absinthe be banned in Switzerland was signed by over 82 000 local people. The momentum to ban the drink was now unstoppable. Absinthe was finally banned in Belgium in 1905, in Switzerland in 1910, in the USA in 1912 and finally in France ? distracted and shell-shocked by the first defeats of World War I - in 1915. In the end this magical and historic elixir that had once captivated, delighted and inspired a nation, went out not with a bang, but with the merest whimper. Most of the great absinthe-producing firms went bankrupt, or amalgamated, or switched to producing pastis. Some firms transferred their production to Spain, where absinthe was never banned, and where it continues to be made on a small scale. In the Val de Travers region of Switzerland, production went underground, and large scale bootlegging operations still exist today. In many countries though absinthe was never formally prohibited ? it just faded from sight. Absinthe has never been banned in the UK, nor in much of Southern and Eastern Europe.. Det har ej heller varit förbjudet i Sverige.
Enl. EU normer får Absint innehålla 10mg thujon/kilo. En bitter upp till 35.
De absinter som görs för att vara bra ligger väl under 10, likaså gjorde de flesta från gamla tider. I Tjeckien försöker man sälja på att de skall vara en drog och petar i extra mycket thujon som försäljningsargument, men det är inget skit att dricka. Likaså har de uppfunnit ett ofog med att sätta fyr på en sockerbit innan för att få ritualen att likna heroinmissbruk.

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