Known as “the green fairy” to its adherents and “the wicked green witch” to its detractors, Absinthe was not for the faint-hearted. “After the first glass” Wilde wrote, “you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world”. Degas’ drinkers portrayed in L’Absinthe (1876), one of around 130 canvases featuring the drink produced by artists such as Manet, van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Picasso, stare vacantly and glumly into the distance.

Associated with fits, convulsions, hallucinations, insanity, and even death, absinthe drinkers were popularly described in Paris as buying a one-way ticket to Charenton, the local lunatic asylum. By the early 20^th century around 30 per cent of the adult male population of large swathes of France had been hospitalised with what was known as absinthisme.

In the 1870s an influential French psychiatrist, Valentin Magnan, studied the effects of Thujone, a neurotoxin found in wormwood which is hallucinogenic in large quantities and lethal in larger quantities still, by force-feeding pure wormwood oil extract to laboratory animals. He discovered that they went into violent convulsions before dying. This convinced him of the deleterious effects of wormwood on the human body, effects which, he believed, could be passed on to the unborn descendants of absinthe addicts.

By the early 20^th century, an unlikely alliance of the emerging temperance movement and winegrowers desperate to regain their market share after the phylloxera disaster seized on Magnan’s findings to pressurise the authorities to rid society of absinthe’s menace. Their cause was helped in 1905 by an allegedly absinthe-addled Swiss farmer, Jean Lanfray, murdering his heavily pregnant wife and two daughters, an outrage that shocked Europe.

The Belgians banned absinthe in 1905, and soon other countries followed suit. The Swiss, after a referendum held on July 5, 1908, specifically wrote absinthe’s prohibition into their constitution, a move that drove production underground. It was banned in America in 1912 and in France by Presidential decree on March 16, 1915, where pastis quickly took its place. The Italians banned it after a referendum in 1932.

Magnan’s research has now been discredited, his methods likened to trying to establish the effect of drinking coffee by feeding animals with pure caffeine, and the levels of thujone were unlikely to have been dangerous. More harmful were the inferior and often poisonous ingredients which unscrupulous distillers used to cash in on the demand for a cheap absinthe, such as copper sulphate for colouring and antimony trichloride to produce the clouding effect. In effect, absinthe had become a victim of its own success.

The ban on absinthe was not universal, though. It could be made and consumed legally in Spain, Pernod distilling it in Tarragona until the 1960s, and in what is now the Czech Republic, where the local version was known as absinth. Never a popular drink in Britain, absinthe was not banned outright but, as it had to be imported, supplies had dried up. Nevertheless, drinks entrepreneur, George Rowley, saw an opportunity to bring the Czech absinth into the UK, exploiting the definition of what was an acceptable level of thujone in the EU Council Directive 88/388/EEC.

In the summer of 1998, working with his local Trading Standards Officer, Paul Passi, Rowley demonstrated that the amount of thujone in absinth was well within the limits defined by the EU. His Czech drink was launched with some style in the appropriately louche setting of the Groucho Club in November 1998.

Gradually, the green fairy got the green light and other countries began to legalise the drink, and even the French formally lifted their ban in 2011, after pressure from the Fédération Française des Spriteux. For aficionados, though, the new wave of Bohemian-style absinthes which emerged in the 1990s were inferior substitutes. To recreate the true essence of the 19^th century spirit, the French Absinthe Museum collaborated with Rowley and Marie-Claude Delahaye to create La Fée Absinthe in 2000, the first real absinthe to be distilled commercially in France since the ban.

Those now enjoying a taste of la vie bohème owe a lot to George Rowley.