Thujone

When you are talking about a herb, okay, use its common name, and the common name here would be Spanish sage to differentiate it from the ordinary sage.

Now, the reason for this is, is that Spanish sage contains a very low level of a substance called thujone, T-H-U-J-O-N-E.

Now, you might say, well, what is the significance of that? Well, thujone in concentrated ongoing usage may precipitate some levels of toxicity.

In Spanish sage, the level of thujone is much less, and that is one of the reasons why it is being used to address cognitive decline and dementia, because if people get benefit from it, if they get benefit from it, they would be inclined to be using that ongoingly, and therefore the possibility of a toxic reaction using Spanish sage is put forward as being related to its low level of thujone.

And modern researchers have gone back and looked at old absinthe, like actual bottles produced before the bands.

And when they tested them, the Thujone levels were generally nowhere near the crazy concentrations people had imagined.

Which means the mysterious hallucinations and madness blamed on absinthe probably weren't being caused by some magical hallucinogenic dose of Thujung.

You know what was in Absinthe in very high concentrations though? Alcohol.

They looked at 2 Jones.

They compared old absinthe to modern products and the picture that emerged was basically, um, y'all may have overreacted.

The Thujone levels in historic absinthe weren't generally high enough to support the claim that absinthe was some unique hallucinic drug.

The mysterious disease called absinthism was increasingly understood as probably being much closer to Chronic heavy alcohol use, which is a lot less exciting because mysterious green fairy drives artists insane.

But anyway, you know, there's compounds in wormwood that...

the Thujone in particular, which is illegal in still a few countries.

So I do think things do need testing.

If people are going to be making things en masse as well, it needs to have some rules and regulations.

If you think about injecting any creature with that body weight and with 72% alcohol, it's basically just suffering from alcohol poisoning.

And I think even the studies show that there's just basically no... no real detectable levels of Thujone at all.

And you had to drink three bottles of absinthe to get something from the, you'd be long dead from the alcohol poisoning.

Exactly.

You'd be long dead from the alcohol poisoning.

Thujone was never an issue.

But you know, back in the day, Upton Sinclair,

you know,