Hey, I've drank multiple different kinds of Absinthe (and Absinte, the fake American kind without wormwood.) The story is this: Absinthe is legal to posses in the US but not legal to sell. So, if you order it from England or the Czech Republic, you can get the real shit; since, it was never actually outlawed in those places, just fell out of popularity. There is really kind of a conspiracy around absinthe. Originally invented by a doctor as a sort of medicine. It became popular with artists, intellectuals, and the bourgeois, after Europe experienced a few years of really bad wine production, due to a drought or something. It was really rather expensive and most people couldn't afford it. But it bacame really popular among everybody pretty much. So, people started producing basically bathtub Absinthe. It was like a lot of the prohibition era Gin and was produced in stills with not very good materials. Think Crank, it was produced using houshold chemicals and things of that sort. Yes, some people did go crazy from it, but it is now believed that this was mostly do to the poor production quality. Most people were actually probably getting alcohol poisoning which can happen very easily if hard liquour is not manufactured correctly. Not only this, but once the wine industry started to come back, Absinthe was hurting their sales. So, they lobbied politicians and influenced newspapers to blow the effects out of proportion. For instance, a man murdered his wife when drunk. The newspapers blamed it on Absinthe because he had drank some Absinthe, but he had also drank whiskey, rum, and other drinks as well. Absinthe was eventually made illegal in most of Europe. Today's absinthe contains way less Wormwood than the old stuff did. Since that is the chemical that supposedly induces hullicination, it is real hard to get enough of it out of modern Absinthe, especially because,in my opinion, Absinthe taste horribly disgusting. It is a liquorice flavor and has a really high alcohol content. You can make your own because you can buy wormwwod itself in some healthfood stores, but I have never done this. I have friends that have had good experiences with this method. Wormwood supposedly has a similar chemical makeup to THC. My understanding is that is is also slightly an upper and the hallucinations are more due to the fact that you are really drunk but lucid, instead of the normal grogginess associated with alcohol. I have experienced a similar feeling when drinking Absinthe. Although it is very interesting for the way it influenced the likes of people like Van Gogh, Hemingway and Salvador Dali, I don't think modern Absinthe is worth the money. If you order it from overseas it is pretty expensive and the wormwood content isn't very high. As, I mentioned before, it is disgusting as well. As far as Van Gogh goes, it is my understanding that he used a lot of Absinthe as well as other things, but the ear incident actually occured after he had been drinking Turpentine, which he supposedly did when he didn't have anything else to fuck him up. Turpentine was also one of the things supposedly used in the "bathtub" Absinthe. Well, if you are interested in what many amazing artists, authors, and musicians experienced; it may be worth a try. But I'd say don't worry about it, it isn't all that.