Talk:Absinthe

Workgroup assignment

Food Science was obvious, Health Sciences made sense from the specialties of toxicology and pharmacology, but I didn't add Chemistry as I saw that as a supporting technique for the others. Romantically inclined chemists, feel free to add it. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:26, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Toxicity of absinthe

The simplest answer is that no one is very sure that thujone is especially toxic to people. We have toxicity data for rats and fruit flies, which I'm sure were present on the Left Bank, but few as mad artists.

Unfortunately, I don't have a decent medical library nearby, so I'm limited to what I can get online, either as abstracts or open source. The paper by Padosch et al. argues absinthism probably did not exist, or at least as anything directly related to thujone. Both the 100-plus proof of historic absinthe, and the reasonable suggestion of 19th century absinthe possibly being contaminated with heavy metals, are other explanation.

From the references so far, the 260 mg/L level seems to have both had some pure supposition, and also was based on the then-available analytical techniques that probably overestimated the thujone level. Howard C. Berkowitz 23:24, 14 January 2009 (UTC)