The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  Wormwood, of course, had long been the chief suspect. As far back as 1708, Johan Lindestolophe’s De Veneris (‘On Poisons’) had warned clearly, from the personal experience of Lindestolophe and his colleague Stenzelius, that continued use of wormwood will cause “great injury to the nervous system”. Around the end of the nineteenth century its active ingredient finally came under closer scrutiny. In 1900 a German chemist called Semmler had proposed the correct structure of thujone, although he originally called it tanacetone, because his starting material was tansy oil. It was clear that this was identical with the thujone of another German chemist named Wallach. Thujone occurs in a variety of plants, but it was named for its presence in thuja oil, an essential oil that can be distilled from Thuja occidentalis (white cedar) and other conifer trees of the arbor vitae group. Thujone occurs in various homely kitchen herbs, and it is identical not only to the tanacetone of tansy but the salvanol found in sage.

  In 1903 Dr.Lalou determined that thujone was largely responsible for absinthe’s effects, linking it to other essences such as those of tansy, sage, hyssop, fennel, coriander, and anis. Thujone is a terpene, closely related to menthol – which pure thujone smells like – and camphor: Vicks Vapor rub contains thujone and other terpenes. Tetra-hydra-cannabinol (THC), the active ingredient of cannabis, is also a terpene, as is myristicin, found in nutmeg. A number of absinthe’s other ingredients – also convulsant and epileptic in sufficient concentration – contain their own terpenes such as hyssop (pinocamphone) and fennel (fenchone).

  Today thujone is classified as a convulsant poison. Around the time of the First World War scientists had already recorded its effect on the nervous system in some detail, without tracing the detailed cause of that effect. It causes excitement of the autonomic nervous system, followed by unconsciousness and convulsions. The involuntary and violent muscular contractions are clonic (rapid and repeating, with intervening relaxation) to begin with, and then tonic (continuous and unremitting). Large enough doses will cause seizures followed by death. Convulsions deliberately induced by camphor and thujone were studied in the 1920s as a model for epilepsy, and they were also used, before the advent of electro-convulsive therapy, to treat schizophrenia and depression.

  And now – keeping in mind the pine-fresh, moth- repelling, mentally stimulating odour of camphor, thujone, and other terpenes – it is time to consider the case of Vincent Van Gogh.

  Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) has long been mythologised as a vital part of the creature we met in Chapter Seven, “that late 19th-century Bohemian monster, the aristocratic dwarf who cut off his ear and lived on a South Sea island.” In fact Van Gogh was far from Bohemian – he was a deeply religious and lonely individual, who lived among the poor and tried to help them, getting nothing but kicks in the teeth for his efforts – but he has ended up as one of absinthe’s most spectacular victims.

  Van Gogh became obsessed with the expressive and purely symbolic values of colour, instead of trying to catch real visual impressions, thereby paving the way for Expressionism. In his ‘Night Café’, for example, with its distorted perspective and its predominant greens and yellows, he said he had “tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil’s furnace, of pale sulphur.”

  Toulouse-Lautrec is said to have introduced Van Gogh to absinthe, and in 1887 Lautrec did a pastel portrait of Van Gogh with a glass of absinthe in front of him. In the same year Van Gogh painted his still life ‘Absinthe’, featuring a glass of absinthe and a water decanter. Writing in the British Journal of Addictions, W.R.Bett paints a lurid mid-twentieth-century picture of absinthe drinking and its alleged effects on Van Gogh’s work. The Marie Corelli-style intensity of Bett’s account can be judged from his inset pen-portrait of Lautrec:

  the satyric figure of a dwarf with enormous head, huge fleshy nose, repulsive scarlet lips, black bushy beard, myopic malevolent eyes… He leans for support on a tiny cane. He stands by a dustbin polluting the night with its hideousness – symbol of filth and putrescence. He sits down at a marble table, eagerly welcomed by those who have wasted life, and now life wastes them: drinking absinthe with hopeless hopefulness. The fairy with the green eyes has enslaved their brains, has stolen their souls. He pollutes the night with foul-mouthed obscenities – symbol of filth and putrescence.

  The extremity of Van Gogh’s life and – in a particularly literal sense – his vision, has led commentators to go beyond the fashion for romanticized psycho-biography and into the realms of the purely clinical. It has been variously suggested that Van Gogh’s brushwork and his treatment of colour and light are the result of schizophrenia, epilepsy, glaucoma, porphyria, digitalis poisoning, and toxic psychosis: the latter being caused by absinthe, as Albert J.Lubin argues in his 1972 psycho-biography Stranger on the Earth. Van Gogh’s work has been a gift for the, “What Was He On?” school of art criticism. Wilkins and Schulz have argued that the oddly distorted perspective of ‘The Night Café’ “may have been influenced by visions he experienced at the beginning of an epileptic seizure”, and indeed by “absinthe, one of the artist’s habitual indulgences… known to affect the occipital lobe, which controls vision.”

  Van Gogh became increasingly unstable and suffered half a dozen psychotic crises in the last two years of his life, at least some of which seem to have been brought on by drinking. His friend Gauguin tried to help him, but found him difficult. One evening they were both drinking absinthe when Van Gogh suddenly threw his glass at Gauguin; next day came the infamous incident when he cut off part of his left ear and delivered it to a prostitute. (As for Gauguin, he was a happier and more robust character: one day in 1897, after receiving a cheque in the post from his Paris dealer, he wrote to a friend from Tahiti “I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe… without a care in the world.”)

  Van Gogh’s mental state worsened, and he experienced epileptic fits and hallucinations. He was drinking cognac and absinthe heavily, and among other bizarre behaviour he tried to drink turpentine. This has led to a persuasive article by Wilfred Neils Arnold, pivoting on the fact that thujone is a terpene. Arnold suggests Van Gogh developed an evident affinity for substances with chemical connections to thujone, notably pinene and thujone’s twin-sister camphor, which he was also dosing himself with. He wrote to his brother Theo, “I fight this insomnia with a very, very strong dose of camphor in my pillow and mattress, and if ever you can’t sleep, I recommend this to you.” Arnold reminds his readers that camphor is identical in structure to thujone, with similar pharmacodynamics, and further points out that a contemporary analysis of camphor oil found that it contained pinene and other terpenes in addition to the camphor itself.

  Around the same time Van Gogh was visited by his friend Signac, who had to restrain him from trying to drink about a quart of turpentine essence from the bottle. As Arnold says, this has usually been regarded as simply demented, but turpentine contains a large amount of pinene and other terpenes. More than that, says Arnold, it might have amounted to a pica – an eating craze, of the kind sometimes found in pregnant women – which would shed light on some of Van Gogh’s oddest acts in his last two years, such as his attempts to eat his paints, which were previously regarded as absurd and unrelated to anything.

  Porphyria – a metabolic disease, often congenital, which can cause intermittent mental illness – has also been suggested as one of Van Gogh’s problems. It is believed that “Mad” King George III suffered from intermittent porphyria. Thujone has other pharmacological actions in addition to its direct effects on the nervous system, and one of these is that it inhibits porphyrin synthesis. It does this so well, in fact, that it has been used in animal experiments to create an experimental model of acute intermittent porphyria. A 1991 article in the British Medical Journal by Loftus and Arnold suggested that Van Gogh had acute intermittent porphyria, a hypot
hesis which makes sense given the porphyrogenic effect of the terpenoids.

  Not that any of this explains Van Gogh’s art, but it might say something about his life, which, by all accounts, grew increasingly unbearable. With his visionary mind and his evidently exacerbated nervous system, Van Gogh derived great pleasure from contemplating the stars, and he had written to his brother Theo:

  to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is, that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train.

  On the 27th of July, 1890, Van Gogh took a gun with him when he went out to paint, and that afternoon he shot himself.

  A search party found him after he failed to show up in the evening, and he died two days later, ushering in one of the most bizarre episodes in his affinitive relationship with thujone, the substance he craved and which seems to have ruled his life to some extent. He was buried in a local cemetery, and an ornamental tree for the grave was provided by his friend Dr Gachet. The tree Gachet chose was a “flame tree”, or thuja tree, later to be identified as the definitive source of thujone. Fifteen years later – the short lease on the grave having expired – Van Gogh was disinterred to be buried with his brother Theo. When the casket was uncovered it was found that the roots of the thujone tree had completely entwined around it, like the last frame in one of those 1950s horror comics; it was, a witness reportedly said, “as though they held him in a strong embrace”.

  Not only was Van Gogh’s body moved, but also the tree, which was transplanted to Dr Gachet’s garden. The tree still survives.

  Thujone has been getting its tentacles around more people with the practice of recreational wormwood abuse, which has been established in the States for some years. Obscure drugs were a part of hippy “head” culture (as in “head shops”, which would sell cigarette papers, perspex water pipes, beads, T-shirts, psychedelic postcards and drug-oriented “comix” – there were several of these shops in the Portobello Road area of London, where they dragged on well past their heyday).

  In 1973 Adam Gottlieb published Legal Highs, a handy little compendium well in tune with the banana-smoking tenor of its times. This was, after all, a period when somebody was said to have died after injecting peanut butter. Most of these things remained legal because nobody except a fool would ever think of taking them, but after an alphabetical catalogue of herbal horrors (random quote: “Effects: Vomiting, intoxication and increased heartbeat, followed by three days of drowsiness or sleep”) we finally come to Wormwood. The active ingredients are given as “Absinthine (a dimeric guaianolide), anabsinthin, and a volatile oil mainly consisting of thujone”. Curious heads are advised that the bitter essential oil, extracted into alcohol, can be combined with Pernod or anisette to make absinthe, and that the effects are narcotic. They are also warned that it may be habit-forming and debilitating, and that thujone may cause stupor and convulsions . It was available as a dried herb from the Magic Garden Herb Company in California, and in the form of Woodley Herber’s dried wormwood Absinthe mixture, “sold only for historical reference”.

  A culture of home-made absinthe drinking has recently gained momentum in America: at its simplest by steeping wormwood leaves in vodka or Pernod. “Kurt”, on the Internet, reports soaking about two ounces of wormwood in alcohol and angostura bitters, then adding an ounce of oil of anise and leaving the mixture for five days. Far from getting drunk, says Kurt, “One shot was enough to really wake me up, and provided two hours of vivid imagination and a euphoric stimulation… I felt very creative and invigorated, but at the same time intoxicated. Vision was slightly distorted (more noticeable in darkness). There was a euphoria and stimulation that had a very unique feel. And this was all due to the absinthe, since the amount of alcohol consumed was under one ounce.” Kurt grows fond of his “tincture of wormwood” drink (and he goes on to try more evolved recipes, with parsley, fennel and anise), but he finally concludes that his memory seems to be deteriorating badly, even after he has stopped drinking it. He signs off with “I’ll keep y’all informed (if I can remember!)”.

  And as far as one can tell, he’s not been heard from since. More recently wormwood oil has become available on the Internet as a “herbal dietary supplement”, although it is not clear what your diet is supposed to be lacking. Wormwood is not known for its vitamins. It also comes with assurances that it has been organically grown, which ought to be the least of anyone’s worries. At least one high quality brand is beautifully packaged, with a label that bears a close relation to a sibling brand of wormwood-free pastis: so close, in fact, that punters might well sense an invitation to put the two together. Absinthe in America is now associated with the Gothic and Witchcraft sub-cultures, the latter being quietly solicited by wormwood oil marketing. We are told that absinthe was reputedly first prepared by witches, with some interesting etymologies: the Anglo-Saxon word wermode means “waremood” or “mind preserver”, and wermod is Old English for “spirit mother”.

  Wormwood oil has also been available for massage and aromatherapy, and it made the headlines in 1997 when a man almost died after drinking some. After becoming intrigued by what he read about absinthe on the Internet, a thirty-one year old Boston man obtained some wormwood oil online from an aromatherapy supplier. He drank only a fraction of an ounce, but was found later at home by his father in an “agitated, incoherent, and disoriented state.” Paramedics noted tonic and clonic seizures with “decorticate posturing”, and in the emergency room he was “lethargic but belligerent”. In addition to seizures he suffered acute kidney failure, followed by heart failure on the second day of hospitalization.

  He survived, after spending more than a week in hospital, and the three Washington doctors who treated him published his case in the New England Journal of Medicine, expressing concern about the availability of toxic substances over the Internet. The case was widely reported and, perhaps unfairly, the man became famous for his stupidity. But in fact his correspondence with the proprietor of www.gumbopages.com – an excellent web-site devoted to New Orleans, which achieved a great deal of unwanted publicity after the doctors claimed its “About Absinthe” section was where the man might have read about absinthe – shows him to be a perfectly intelligent, articulate and thoughtful individual.

  I am the one who drank the wormwood oil… I believe you were unlucky to be mentioned, but that is all it is – bad luck, a subject whereof I know what I speak.

  And I agree with you that to blame the Internet is hysterical and perhaps disingenuous.

  There was no confusion in my mind [between wormwood oil and absinthe]. My mistake was in being reckless with my math[s] and taking far too much.

  I am sorry for any pain this has caused you.

  It is very different from the public face of the case. As one American newspaper reminded readers at the time, “Absinthe… has been banned in most countries for decades because it is – doh! – poisonous.”

  Even the most knowledgeable of amateur absinthe enthusiasts are not immune to accidental wormwood poisoning. One of the three women quoted at the beginning of this chapter reports a bad experience with home-made absinthe:

  I tried adding wormwood essence to a recent batch… worked very well… but I didn’t think about the additional wormwood and drank a bit more than I should have… got very ill. Was also seeing “trails” and got rather anxious. So yes, I have experienced the hallucinatory effects of it. But getting to that point is quite dangerous.

  There have been a number of comparisons between absinthe and cannabis – absinthe has been called “the liquid joint”. There are cultural reasons why people might want to believe this, but it also goes back to a now superceded 1975 article, ‘Marij
uana, absinthe and the central nervous system’, by del Castillo et al. The authors claimed striking similarities between the psychological effects reported by users of absinthe and marijuana, basing this in part on a 1971 Playboy feature on absinthe by Maurice Zolotow, who told his readers that absinthe was “one of the best and safest aphrodisiacs ever invented by the mind of man”.

  Del Castillo and colleagues pointed out that both thujone and tetrahydrocannabinol are terpenoid, with a similar molecular structure, and proposed that they produce their psychotomimetic effects by acting on the same receptor in the brain. They concluded that this supposed overlap was interesting from a historical and sociological point of view, which it would be, if it were true. But the effects of absinthe and cannabis are different. Although cannabis can cause short term excitation, sometimes as a result of anxiety attacks, it is a mild hallucinogen and ultimately a stupefiant. Thujone, in contrast, is a stimulant, ultimately a lethal over-stimulant and a convulsant poison.

  Trekking through a remote and mountainous region of Afghanistan, Eric Newby observed his horses frequently stopping to eat wormwood, “artemisia absinthium, a root for which they had a morbid craving”. The result of this was that they became “extremely frisky, possibly due to some aphrodisiac quality possessed by the root absinthium on which they continued to gorge themselves”. Rats are also stimulated by thujone, to the extent that in one experiment it seemed to make them more intelligent: Pinto-Scognamilio, back in 1968, showed that thujone made rats more active, and even seemed to increase the learning abilities of slower rats. He also raised a more important and ominous point, which is that the dosage of thujone has a cumulative effect, referring to an earlier experiment which found that rats accumulated about 5% per day of the daily dose. By the thirty-eighth day they were beginning to have convulsions, which takes us back to nineteenth-century Paris. Small regular doses evidently could accumulate in the body to produce toxic, psychoactive, hallucinatory effects.