Liberal Talk Radio

This is what you get to do if you’re a chemist in the Big Easy:

You need wormwood to make real absinthe, but the herb is a tricky one to work with — one of its key compounds, thujone, has long been considered the cause of the drink’s supposed side effects: hallucinations, artistic inspiration, degeneracy and homicidal mania. Thujone has been prohibited as a food and drink ingredient in the United States since 1912.

But Ted Breaux, a chemist from New Orleans and one of the prime movers in the absinthe revival, has developed Lucid, a real absinthe made with real wormwood that can be legally sold in the United States.

It turns out that thujone isn’t actually present in massive quantities in vintage bottles of absinthe, leading Breaux to conclude that it isn’t the key ingredient (and leading many of us to wonder, again, what the hell is wrong with the Food and Drug Administration).