ABSINTHE, the potent green drink favoured by poets and painters, is legal again in Switzerland, where it was concocted as an all-purpose medicine.

The Government yesterday overturned a 97-year ban, imposed when an absinthe-crazed mountain farmer shot his family. Entrepreneurs are jostling already to open the first legal absinthe bar.

The drink opened the eyes of Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde and Ernest Hemingway and was known variously as the Green Fairy and the Philosopher’s Tipple. The French poet Charles Baudelaire dyed his hair green in its honour. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec painted some of his dancers while in a state of absinthe hallucination.

The conventional wisdom of the 20th century, that absinthe leads to madness, has been generally discarded and it is becoming fashionable again.

It is legal in much of the European Union, including Britain. In Berlin the absinthe bar has become a site of pilgrimage for Americans — the drink is banned in the United States — where they can be seen pouring it into mouthwash bottles. The colour and the smell, if not the effect, is similar enough to fool customs officials.

The Swiss are trying to end an anomaly whereby much of Europe is celebrating and reviving a drink that it invented. The Henriod sisters in Val de Travers prepared a secret recipe in the 1770s that mixed alcohol, wormwood, anis, lemon melissa and other herbs into a medicine that could supposedly cure coughs, depression, bone pains and stomach complaints. It was also regarded as an aphrodisiac, hence Addison Mizner’s witticism, “absinthe makes the tart grow fonder”.

The French secured the recipe from the Swiss sisters and the big breakthrough for the drink as a popular recreational beverage, rather than medicine, came in the mid-19th century, when absinthe was served to French soldiers in Algeria. It was used to combat stomach bacteria and improve fighting spirit.

When the veterans returned, demand increased. Soon it became the most popular of French café drinks. The Parisian equivalent of English tea time was l’heure verte, the “green hour”.

It was identified as a dangerous drug early in the last century, partly because some of the poets and writers using it killed themselves. The problem seemed to be the addition of wormwood, which was held responsible for side effects that included renal failure, convulsions and foaming at the mouth.

RAISE A GLASS

• Absinthe is legal in the EU, Canada and Japan, but illegal in the US
• The word absinthe comes from the Greek absinthion, meaning undrinkable
• Kylie Minogue played the green absinthe fairy in the film Moulin Rouge
• The Russian word for absinthe is chernobyl
• In 1900 its largest distillery made 30,000 litres (6,600 gallons) a day

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