PRAGUE, Czech Republic -- Human beings have invented or discovered an abundance of substances that offer short-term pleasure, often in exchange for long-term grief -- things like alcohol, cocaine, heroin. Few such products have yielded such a spate of griefs as absinthe, the drink favored by bohemians a century ago in Paris and other cosmopolitan locales in Europe and the United States.
Absinthe was dangerous: It drove men mad. Degas portrayed its stupefying effect artfully in his painting "L'Absinthe." Picasso and Manet worked the same theme. Some believed this drink, formulated in the 18th century by Henri Louis Pernod, stimulated artistic creativity. Talky Oscar Wilde prattled on about visions. Baudelaire drank it for inspiration. So did Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, van Gogh. Others regard tales of its inspirational qualities as pish-posh.
Looking back, the pish-posh school of thought seems to hold more credit, if only because of the millions upon millions of others who drank absinthe during its heyday and went on to create absolutely nothing.
The French had been making and selling absinthe for nearly a century before they banned it in 1915, by which time they were consuming 10 million gallons a year. Other countries had moved more quickly: Belgium in 1905, Switzerland in 1910. A little later the United States went along. This followed years of observation by physicians of absinthe's longer-range effects, including convulsions, hallucinations, insanity and other reactions. Thus, its prohibition was understandable.
So, should one be apprehensive at the news that absinthe is back? It is. They make it here in the Czech Republic. They started after the Communists were thrown out.
After absinthe's prohibition, substitutes emerged: Pernod, anis, ouzo. Newsweek reports that there's one on the market in the United States, called Absente. All taste similar to absinthe but lack the stuff that made the original so dangerous: thujone. Thujone, contained in wormwood (artemisia), upon which the drink is based, was absinthe's sinister secret.
The current Czech product, according to Daniel Hill, a member of the family that produces absinthe in the town of Jindrichuv Hradec, in southern Bohemia, has a "negligible" amount of thujone. "It wouldn't be absinthe without it," he says.
The best news, says diplomat Marcel Sauer at the Czech Embassy in Washington, is this: "You don't go mad anymore."
