It looks better than it tastes.

I'D LIKE to say that the first time I ever drank absinthe, I was in a London nightclub doing shots out of some Page 3 girl's pierced belly button, but alas, in reality, it was in the living room of my friend Bob's ex-girlfriend's council flat in a charming little farming village in Northumberland. (For those who haven't been there, Northumberland is kind of the Kansas of England, except that it has more castles and you can teach evolution in the schools.) Despite her complete lack of inhibition in bed and uncanny resemblance to Lara Croft, Bob had recently discontinued inserting his kebab into Nikki's chip shop because of, among other reasons, her unfortunate habit of flipping out and spray-painting his car.

Unfortunately, my showing up on his doorstep with my raging curiosity and the genie bottle of recently legalized green elixir coincided perfectly with the sniffing-around-for-post-breakup-sex-against-your-better-judgment phase of their relationship. Several glasses of the stuff-which, I must admit, tasted more than a little like turpentine-launched me on a free-association monologue on how the launching of Sputnik in 1957 had directly led to my being there in Nikki's living room, which I wrapped up with the declaration: "My mouth?is no longer connected to my jaw." (The rationale went like this: Sputnik spurred the U.S. government to start the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, which led to the internet being created, which led to mutual friends of mine and Bob's meeting, which led to his and my getting drunk at Nikki's house.)

Bob, who had had more than a few himself, gallantly helped me back to his parlor sofa, and then headed back across the sheep field to, as he put it, "fuck Lara Croft"-a decision that had grave consequences for his auto repair bill, not to mention his sanity.

Thus, my first encounter with Artemisia absinthium involved the two phenomena most commonly associated with the green fairy: inspiration and ruination.

As Jad Adams chronicles the liqueur's history in his marvelously entertaining Hideous Absinthe, the habit of drinking infusions of wormwood was first introduced into France in the early 1800s by soldiers returning from North Africa, where they were dosed with the stuff as an antimalarial instead of the more expensive quinine. Because of its relative cheapness, absinthe quickly spread among the down-and-out of society, aided by an opportune wine drought. The drink soon became to the self-consciously starving artists and writers of Paris cafe society what heroin was to grunge rockers in the 1990s: a muse, an escape, a masochistic signifier of one's own degradation, a means of getting high when all other thrills were exhausted, and a way to épater le bourgeois-at least until the bourgeois began adopting absinthe chic themselves (and incidentally proving that Pabst Blue Ribbon was hardly the first alcoholic drink to cross the line from the gutter to the gentry).

Since everyone who pretended to be anyone in 19th-century art and literature drank-or was rumored to drink-absinthe, Adams' book also doubles as a crash course on the history of such antisocial types as the Romantics, the Impressionists, the Symbolists and the English Decadents. Whether absinthe actually made one mad, bad and dangerous to know, or if it was merely favored by those who already fancied themselves that way, is a critical issue in the book. Nineteenth-century French and British debates on absinthe-which insisted on drawing a line between destructive "absinthism" and the healthy practice of drinking a few liters of "natural" wine or beer every day-parallel the pollyannaish U.S. government-endorsed stance on drugs, which allows us all the brand-name booze, nicotine and caffeine we can buy, but insists that pot is a dangerous "gateway drug" that will lead to a life of crime, desperation and deep appreciation of Lou Reed songs.

An American author might have bought into the myth of absinthe as a mind-wrecking distillation of pure evil, but Adams is a Brit, and, with the pragmatism typical of a country where kids start drinking at 16, makes the important point that it was often merely the cheapest liquor available, and only one of many that artistic alcoholics regularly imbibed. Moreover, he argues that, despite the evidence provided by white-coated men of science shooting up innocent, doomed guinea pigs with megadoses of intravenous wormwood distillates, the effects of overindulging in the green fairy are the same as those of chronic alcoholism. When European temperance societies made efforts to ban the drink around the time of the First World War, they chased the red herring of its relatively low amount of psychoactive ingredients, while allowing other drinks with even greater alcohol content a free pass. In the United States, Prohibition did a more thorough job, limiting absinthe consumption to rich bootleggers and such manly men as Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, who were able to go abroad to get their fix. A brief Hugh Hefner-inspired revival in the early 1970s was snuffed out by the FDA's quickly classifying wormwood as a dangerous food additive. Thus, it wasn't until the Iron Curtain fell that a steady stream of green began trickling into the West from Prague.

These days, the E.U. in general and the UK in particular have begun to take a more rational stance on recreational drugs, decriminalizing pot and starting to tolerate everything else. In Edinburgh, for instance, you can stop by the harm-reduction organization Crew 2000's storefront on Cockburn St. and get a test kit for your ecstasy or free works for your heroin; anyone trying that in the U.S. would be shut down quicker than you can say "John Ashcroft" five times fast. Thus, over the past decade or so, absinthe has gradually become a minor fad for everyone from Burning Man attendees and Anton LaVey-worshipping goth kids to music-industry stiffs who like to pretend they're one with the artists, and the green poison now comes in a few dozen designer labels.

Will the U.S. follow the E.U.'s example and let some entrepreneurial spirit in black eyeliner start up a domestic absinthe industry? I'd sooner place my bets on medical marijuana. But there are advantages to the green fairy being a party drug of white professionals who like dressing up in vinyl and leather on weekends: I recently picked up a bottle of La Fée in the duty-free at Heathrow and strolled through U.S. customs at Kennedy with it. If I'd been a Mexican with a dimebag of pot, I'd have been well and truly fucked.