On Tuesday, I went to a launch party for Kübler absinthe, a brand of the green, mystique-laden drink that, after nearly a century of a U.S. absinthe ban, has been approved for sales inside the country. (The drink is imported from Switzerland, considered the birthplace of absinthe.) The drink was long feared to have a mind-altering, hallucinogenic effect, and the party was, as you might expect, a theatrical affair — held in a booty club called Aria, filled with models dressed with butterfly wings. As the night went on, the mostly business crowd unwound, took to the dance floor, grinded up against each other. A couple started heavily making out near the bar.

But was this the result of absinthe? I submit to you: Sure, because it’s booze. But it’s no different from any other.

The mystique clearly draws people to the drink. Party-goers were trying to evaluate the absinthe’s effect on them, and made the kind of claims I remember kids in middle school making when they pretended like they had been drunk for the first time: that everything feels clearer, more heightened, more flush. Placebo, all of it. I had four glasses (which, at 53 percent alcohol, ain’t kidding around, even if some of them were mixed drinks), and felt just as if I had downed a fair amount of Disaronno.

Don’t get me wrong: Absinthe (or at least, absinthe as we know it now, which isn’t anything like absinthe as it once was) is nice. It’s a fun, high-maintenance drink that requires the liquor, a sugar cube, a cool-looking spoon, and ice water. When ready to drink, it’s cloudy and light green, and everyone says it tastes like licorice, except better. A little sweet, bitter without the sugar. But absinthe was banned for reasons of politics and hysteria (according to the New Yorker’s absinthe piece from last year, sadly not online in full), and its legend as a mind-changer grew from that, not the drink itself. The party-goers didn’t seem interested in (or informed of) that boring truth, though, and I suspect that’s why Kübler will succeed.