Asteraceae
Artemisia absinthium
Wormwood · Absinthe
- Part used
- leafaerial
- Native range
- Europe, north Africa and temperate Asia; naturalised widely
- Morphology
- A silvery-grey aromatic perennial to a metre, the whole plant covered in fine hairs, with deeply divided leaves and small drooping yellow flower heads. Intensely bitter to taste.
What is in it
Evidence
Small trials suggest benefit in Crohn disease. The bitter effect on digestive secretion is a real and well-characterised reflex. Most traditional uses are untested.
Safety
Thujone is a GABA antagonist and is convulsant in quantity. Prolonged or high-dose use of the essential oil causes seizures, and the oil should not be taken internally. Contraindicated in pregnancy and in epilepsy.
Interactions: May lower seizure threshold; caution with anticonvulsants
Regulatory: Thujone content in food and drink is capped by regulation in Australia, the EU and the US.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Recorded from Egyptian sources onward and consistently used for digestion and as an anthelmintic — the common name records the second use. The basis of absinthe from the late eighteenth century.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Absinthe is the best-known case of a moral panic being blamed on the wrong molecule.
Late nineteenth-century France attributed a syndrome of hallucination, seizure and madness to thujone, and banned the drink across much of Europe and the United States. Modern analysis of pre-ban bottles found thujone at levels far too low to account for any of it. What absinthe actually contained was around seventy per cent alcohol, frequently adulterated with copper salts and antimony trichloride to fake the colour and the louche.
Absinthism was alcoholism, plus poisoning by the adulterants — which places it squarely in the same category as the modern findings on undeclared ingredients in imported preparations. The bans have since been lifted almost everywhere.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.