a pleasant ritual: With an absinthe spoon, the drinker held a sugar cube over a small quantity of the liqueur and poured water over the cube to dilute the drink's bitter taste. Like most of the drugs that came after it, ab- sinthe was said to be an aphrodisiac. As the poet Ernest Dowson put it, "absinthe makes the tart grow fonder." The liqueur was immortalized in paintings such as Edouard Manet's The Absinthe Drinker and championed the poets Charles Baude- laire and Arthur Rimbaud. The...