The History of Absinthe — The Drink Europe Tried to Erase

In 1905, a man murdered his pregnant wife and two young daughters in a small Swiss village. The newspapers didn't blame him. They blamed the drink in his glass — a cloudy green liquor called absinthe. Within five years, that single incident helped trigger one of the most sweeping drink bans in Western history. Absinthe was outlawed across Europe and, by 1912, banned in the United States. It would stay illegal in America for 95 years — longer than Prohibition, longer than any other drink in history. But the story they told you was a lie. The science behind the ban was fabricated by a French psychiatrist who injected concentrated wormwood oil directly into dogs and called it proof. The real villains weren't scientists — they were the wine industry, the temperance movement, and a government that found it easier to ban a drink than to admit its country simply drank too much. In this video, we trace the full story of absinthe — from a bitter medicinal weed used in ancient Egypt, to the emerald-green elixir that fueled the artists of Belle Époque Paris, to the working-class drink that conquered an entire continent. We follow the green fairy through the salons of Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh, through the marble absinthe fountains of New Orleans, through the fraud that destroyed her — and all the way to the New Orleans chemist who, in the year 2000, cracked open century-old bottles and proved the ban was built on nothing. The chemical they outlawed absinthe over? It's in your Thanksgiving stuffing. It always was. The green fairy was never dangerous. She was just inconvenient.