Absinthe Murders
Absinthe Murders The first, committed by Jean Lanfray on August 28, 1905 in Vaud, Switzerland, is an excellent example of isolated incidents revealing, in hindsight, underlying causes for banning a drug. Lanfray, a 31-year-old farmer, viciously gunned down his wife and child, then attempted to kill himself. It was found after the murder that Lanfray had been drinking absinthe. It was also found at this time that Lanfray had drunk, over the day: a creme de menthe, a cognac and soda, seven glasses of wine, brandy-laced coffee, another litre of wine, and another slug of brandy. When the police learned that Lanfray sometimes drank up to five litres of wine a day, they might have been interested, but when they learned that he had drunk two glasses of absinthe on the day of the murders, the newspapers authoritatively named the Lanfray case the "absinthe murder." Within a few weeks, over almost 85,000 signatures were gathered in favor of banning the drink. Shortly thereafter, in Geneva, an absinthe-binging man named Sallaz killed his wife with a hatchet and a revolver(Conrad 4). Here, an anti-absinthe petition gained a formidable 34,702 signatures(Conrad 4). Ideas of wormwood as a cure for drunkenness were apparently ignored or totally disregarded. Why were the authorities so interested in blaming absinthe over all the other drinks Lanfray (and possibly Sallaz) had drunken, rather than, for instance, the excessive amounts of wine he had imbibed?
Tags: Absinthe, Crime, Delirium, History
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