The United States has a storied history of medical charlatanism. In the 1890s, a Pennsylvania newspaper reporter turned publisher turned patent medicine mountebank named James Monroe “Money” Munyon peddled “a Munyon Pill for Every Ill,” promising to cure rheumatism, neuralgia, “female problems,” and dyspepsia. Other quacksalvers and confidence men sold Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Snake Oil, Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root, Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, and other excellent remedies. Many of these people ran into legal trouble after some killjoys in the Progressive Movement persuaded Congress to pass, in 1906, the Pure Food and Drugs Act, which created the agency known today as the Food and Drug Administration.
Fond thoughts of this tradition were revived this week by a New York Times investigation by Kenneth P. Vogel and Christina Jewett about efforts by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr., and possibly President Donald Trump to clear a regulatory path for a dietary supplement called kratom that “interacts with the brain’s opioid receptors” and “has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures, and thousands of deaths.” (Trump’s role in this mess is hard to pin down because the public statement he made on the subject was, characteristically, incoherent.)
The GOP actions are in response to a multimillion-dollar influence campaign led by Jerry W. Ross, founder of a kratom manufacturer called Botanic Tonics, a company in which Mullin invested between $500,000 and $1 million. Ross founded his company seven years after being released from prison, where he’d been sent for diverting $10 million from Oklahoma oil and gas companies that he ran under the name Jerry D. Cash. In 2023, the FDA seized 250,000 bottles of Botanic Tonics kratom from a Tulsa warehouse and posted on its website that “kratom is not lawfully marketed in the U.S. as a drug product, a dietary supplement, or a food additive in conventional food.” But last December the Justice department abruptly dropped its prosecution of Botanic Tonics. Just another day in the Trump administration.
But the Times story got me thinking: When did patent medicines—which today go by the more polite name dietary supplement—become the exclusive province of the Republican Party?
If this legacy of chicanery possesses any political pedigree at all, it’s Democratic. That’s because, after the Pure Food and Drugs Act put most peddlers of liniments and kidney renovators and bladder remedies out of business, medicine shows continued to flourish in the then-solidly-Democratic South. The last great medicine show was the Hadacol Caravan, which barnstormed through the 1940s featuring stars like Hank Williams and Mickey Rooney. The Caravan’s impresario was one Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Democratic state senator in Louisiana. LeBlanc manufactured a “vitamin supplement” called Hadacol whose popularity, especially in dry counties, derived from its alcohol content of 12 percent, memorialized in a popular country-western song called “What Put the Pep In Grandma.”
Asked by Groucho Marx, in a 1951 appearance on “You Bet Your Life,” what Hadacol was good for, LeBlanc replied: “It was good for $5.5 million for me last year.” A few months later the Federal Trade Commission came calling. It concluded that LeBlanc was engaged in “false, misleading, and deceptive” business practices by marketing Hadacol as “an effective treatment and cure for scores of ailments and diseases.” LeBlanc’s answer was to run for governor of Louisiana. He lost.
I struggle to pinpoint the historical moment when medical quackery stopped being a Democratic pastime and became a Republican one. It didn’t happen all at once. One transitional figure may have been Ronald Reagan, who in the 1940s, while still a Democrat, appeared in magazine ads for Chesterfield cigarettes touting their mildness, a characteristic that tobacco companies encouraged smokers to believe made cigarettes more healthy. Reagan would later oppose creation of Medicare (in league, bizarrely, with the American Medical Association, which was slow to realize that Medicare would make doctors rich). The GOP eventually made peace with the program’s existence, but it argued endlessly for privatization schemes and budget cuts on the false premise that Medicare and its sister program for the poor, Medicaid, were riddled with fraud.
Demonizing the medical establishment as crooked probably helped encourage Republicans to fill the void left by Dudley LeBlanc after he died in 1971. Capitol Hill’s last gasp of Democratic quackery was a 1976 bill sponsored by Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire prohibiting the FDA from “establishing standards limiting potency of vitamins and minerals in food supplements or regulating them as drugs based solely on potency.” After that, the cause was taken up by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah.
Why Hatch? Because herbal medicine was a strong Mormon tradition (Joseph Smith disdained medical doctors). The state is home to so many manufacturers of herbal and dietary supplements that a stretch of highway running through Salt Lake City is nicknamed Cellulose Valley. In 1994, Hatch sponsored the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, which allowed manufacturers to sell these products without first demonstrating that they are safe. One FDA commissioner later complained: “Products that contain substances similar to those found in prescription drugs are marketed for children as dietary supplements. Likewise, products with ingredients that simulate illicit street drugs are marketed as dietary supplements to adolescents via the Internet and shops specializing in drug paraphernalia.”
Steven Pray, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Oklahaoma, complained in The Journal of Child Neurology that “Patients who purchase dietary supplements take the place of the laboratory rats used in legitimate safety research…. The United States is little better than a third-world country in regard to access to unknown products.”
Through the 1980s, dietary supplements and herbal remedies had been the exclusive province of granola-crunching New Age lefties. Indeed, Marin County remained an anti-vaxxer haven until 2020, when the MAGA right’s stubborn resistance to the Covid vaccine rendered that position no longer socially tenable. But after the Hatch bill became law, vaccine-skepticism increasingly became a right-wing thing. Alex Jones’s online store is a pharmacopeia of alt medicines: methyline blue, t-3 trifecta iodine tincture, turmeric gummies, sea moss capsules, and so on. Fox News is so reliant on pitches for dietary supplements and dubious gold-based retirement strategies that I’ve long argued the FTC should investigate the cable network as a form of elder abuse, on the grounds that its conspiracist news programming is a retiree-sorting mechanism to deliver the biggest suckers to advertisers. As Paul Krugman put it in 2021, “There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable.”
That’s no secret to the Republican former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. A decade ago, McDonnell got busted for accepting gifts and money while in office in exchange for smoothing the regulatory path for a dietary supplement called Antabloc. His conviction was later overturned by the reactionary Supreme Court in one of a series of decisions decriminalizing political bribery. Bill O’Reilly, Doctor Phil, and Mike Huckabee can’t say enough good things about something called Relaxium. I doubt they’ve done so for free.
“Dear NewsMax Reader,” read a note to Rick Perlstein, a best-selling student of right-wing movements, as related in a 2012 Perlstein piece in The Baffler that documented how wholly the conservative movement had given itself over to scammers and hustlers:
If you have shied away from profiting from the immense promise of stem cells to treat disease because of moral concern over extracting stem cells from fetal tissue, pay close attention. You can now invest with a clear conscience. An Israeli entrepreneur, Zami Aberman, has discovered “an oilfield in the placenta.”
And now kratom.
If the GOP is going to bring back patent medicines, then I demand we be entertained by the medicine shows that used to go along with them. It was on a bus for Hadacol Caravan, legend has it, that Hank Williams plucked the first notes of “Jambalaya.” That beats the hell out of a UFC Freedom 250 Match.
