Absinthe

New York Times article on absinthe's come-back and increasing popularity:

[Absinthe is] a green-colored, high-proof herbal liquor that was illegal in the United States for more than 95 years. And not just here, for when that mini-Prohibition began in 1912, alarm bells were ringing all over Europe. In 1905 a Swiss man murdered his family after drinking absinthe, leading to the liquor’s banishment from that country, where it originated. The French thought they risked losing World War I to robust beer-drinking Germans because of the dissolute influence of absinthe, so it was banned in that nation as well.

The medical evidence was also damning. As early as 1879 The New York Times warned that absinthe “is much more perilous, as well as more deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor.” A 19th-century French doctor, who made a lifetime study of absinthism, chronicled its symptoms: “sudden delirium, epileptic attacks, vertigo, hallucinatory delirium.”

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