Posts Tagged ‘Manhattan’
“It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form”*…
We Americans spend over $60 Billion a year on dietary supplements and herbal remedies; to the extent that the market is regulated here in the U.S. it is (essentially exclusively) by the FDA– which treats the category as “food,” not “medicine” and “oversees” the industry/market very lightly. Indeed, while the extent of fraud in the supplement/remedy market (ineffective, mislabeled, or dangerous products) is estimated to be in the billions of dollars per year, the introduction to the FDA’s data base of “Health Fraud Products” reads:
This list includes unapproved products that have been subject to FDA health fraud related violations. These products have been cited in warning letters, online advisory letters, recalls, public notifications, and press announcements for issues varying from products marketed as dietary supplements claiming to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent disease, to the use of undeclared ingredients or new dietary ingredients.
This list only includes a small fraction of the potentially hazardous products marketed to consumers online and in retail establishments. Even if a product is not included in this list, consumers should exercise caution before using certain products…
That said, over half of us make those choices based on health and wellness information from social media influencers or podcasts… and too often these days, even the ostensibly qualified pitch-people are being faked by AI.
As Matthew Wills reminds us, we’ve been here before…
Never more than seventeen thousand people, the Shakers are today best remembered for their handsome furniture. In their own time they were renowned for their homemade medicinal remedies. They might have had a dubious reputation for their outlandish dancing, celibacy, gender equality, and for believing that their founder, “Mother” Ann Lee, was a manifestation of Christ’s Second Coming, but their guarantee of purity in their botanical products was generally accepted as given.
So much so that as Shaker communities dwindled through the nineteenth century, others wanted the cachet of their name in the patent medicine world. Amid all the fakery and flimflam of the pre-regulated drug market, the Shaker brand was the best.
It was worth stealing, and defending.
The Shakers, or more properly the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, arrived in North America from England in 1774. They established their first communes in New York and New England, then farther into the continent as the European frontier expanded. Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, and Florida also boasted Shaker outposts, mostly shorter-lived than the original ones.
At first, Shakers funded their separation from the “world” by selling furniture and housewares to non-Shakers. But as the number of Shakers dwindled and America’s industrial capacity increased, Shakers typically turned to selling seeds, simples [here], and botanically-based remedies. These were easier to produce, and, imbued with the Shaker reputation for purity, were as good as gold.
Medical historian J. Worth Estes quotes an 1881 almanac advertising Shaker remedies on the basic principles of Shakerism:
innocence, temperance, virgin purity, love, peace, justice, holiness, goodness, and truth. The almanac further explained that Shakers are “just and honest in all [their] dealings with mankind,” and that they “eschew every species of falsehood: lying, deceit and hypocrisy.” Such statements helped “guarantee” the purity and high quality of Shaker-made drugs in the nineteenth century struggle for the American drug market.
Shakers provided ingredients for “worldly” producers, and, in some cases, they even provided start-up capital for non-Shaker manufacturers. The A.J. White company of New York, New York, made Shaker Extract of Roots and Mother Seigel’s Curative Syrup with Shaker-sourced botanicals and capital. This remedy was advertised as “a cure for impurities of the blood” and “a cure for dyspepsia and liver complaints.” A.J. White’s company successfully expanded overseas, and when he died in 1898, his English branch bought out his American branch; in various guises the company existed until 1957, when it was purchased by Smith, Kline & French, whose successor entity is today the world’s tenth largest pharmaceutical company.
In the 1880s, Smith Bros. & Co. of Montreal started producing a product called Shakers’ Blood Syrup. This had a label similar to A.J. White’s Shaker Extract, except it said “Cures completely scrofula, cancer, rheumatism, catarrh, ulcers & skin & blood diseases.” The Shakers of New Lebanon, New York, sued for patent infringement and Smith Bros. agreed to stop pirating the Shaker name.
Shakers also produced their own remedies on their communes. Corbett’s Syrup of Sarsaparilla, for instance, was made in Canterbury, New Hampshire for about half a century until 1896. In 1886, it was one of the few Shaker products to be awarded a U.S. patent. Promoted as “a blood purifier and therefore, by implication, as a panacea,” it was made of “an aqueous mixture of sarsaparilla root, pipsissewa, yellow dock root, dandelion, thoroughwort, black cohosh, elder flowers, Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate), juniper berries, blue gentian, pokeweed root, sugar and alcohol.” At some point potassium iodide was added to “ensure the remedy’s ‘purity.’”
Estes provides a checklist of some 80 other proprietary medicines made in Shaker communities. The names are marvelous: Brother Barnabas Hinckley’s Compound Concentrated Syrup of Bitter Bugle, Eclectic Live Pills, Larus Eye Water, Vegetable Family Pills, Young Shakers’ Grand Catholicon. As Estes notes, more than a few of these products had active ingredients that were cathartic or purgative, a fact rarely noted on labels. Cathartics are generally defined as working faster than laxatives.
After the Food and Drug Act of 1906, products like the 75% alcohol (sanitizer strength!) Norwood’s Tincture of Veratrum Viride, made by non-Shakers with Shaker-sourced botanical ingredients, had to be labeled “Poison” on their instructions for use. Patent medicines, and the Shakers, didn’t survive the twentieth century…
Amid the fraud and flimflam of early drug markets, Shakers stood for purity, creating a brand others were eager to exploit: “A Trusted Name in a Dubious Drug Market” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
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As we hear history rhyme, we might recall that it was on this date in 1626 that Peter Minuit, the new director of “New Netherland” for the Dutch West India Company, in what we now know as Manhattan, “purchased” the island from the the Canarsee tribe of Native Americans for a parcel of goods worth 60 guilders: roughly $24 dollars at the time, now just over $1,000.
In the event, Native Americans in the area were unfamiliar with the European notions and definitions of ownership rights. As they understood it, water, air and land could not be traded. So scholars are convinced that both parties probably went home with totally different interpretations of the sales agreement. In any case, the Carnarsees were likely happy to take payment in any meaningful amount pertaining to land that was mostly controlled by their rivals, the Weckquaesgeeks.
1626 letter from Pieter Schaghen (a colleague of Minuit) reporting the purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders [source]
“The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It’s hard to stay ahead of the curve.”*…
Jeff VanderMeer is a master of teasing out the weird in the service of critiquing our relationship with nature; his novels– e.g., Annihilation, Hummingbird Salamander— are entertaining, illuminating cautionary tales. In a recent essay, he turned his attention to his native Florida…
About the size of Greece, Florida is the jewel in the crown of the amazingly biodiverse Atlantic Coastal Plain. The state has 1,300 miles of shoreline, 600 clear-water springs, 1,700 ravines and streams, and over 8,000 lakes. More than 3,000 native trees, shrubs, and flowering plants are native to Florida, many unique to our peninsula and also endangered due to development. Our 100 species of orchid (compared to Hawai’i’s three native orchids) and 150 fern species speak to the moist and subtropical climate across many parts of the state. Florida has more wetlands than any other conterminous state—11 million acres—including seepage wetlands, interior marshes, and interior swamp land. Prior to the 1800s, Florida had over 20 million acres of wetlands.
As Jen Lomberk of Matanzas Riverkeeper describes it, Florida’s aquifer is unique because it is “so inextricably connected both underground and to surface waters. Florida’s limestone geology means that pollutants can readily move through groundwater and from groundwater to surface water (and vice versa).” In a sense, the very water we drink in Florida lays bare the connections between the often-invisible systems that sustain life on Earth and reveals both the strength of these systems and their vulnerability.
[But Floridians aren’t stewarding these unique resources…]
Most of this harm has been inflicted in the service of unlimited and poorly planned growth, sparked by greed and short-term profit. This murder of the natural world has accelerated in the last decade to depths unheard of. The process has been deliberate, often systemic, and conducted from on-high to down-low, with special interests flooding the state with dark money, given to both state and local politicians in support of projects that bear no relationship to best management of natural resources. These projects typically reinforce income inequality and divert attention and money away from traditionally disadvantaged communities.
Consider this: several football fields-worth of forest and other valuable habitat is cleared per day in Florida, with 26 percent of our canopy cut down in the past twenty years. According to one study, an average of 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation worldwide.
The ecocide happening here is comparable for our size to the destruction of the Amazon, but much less remarked upon. Few of the perpetrators understand how they hurt the quality of life for people living in Florida and hamstring any possibility of climate crisis resiliency. Prodevelopment flacks like to pull out the estimates of the millions who will continue to flock to Florida by 2030 or 2040 to justify rampant development. Even some Florida economists ignore the effects of the climate crisis in their projects for 2049, expecting continued economic growth. but these estimates are just a grim joke, and some of those regurgitating them know that. By 2050, the world likely will be grappling with the fallout from 1.5- to 2-degree temperature rise and it’s unlikely people will be flocking to a state quickly dissolving around all of its edges…
An accelerating race to destroy Florida’s wilderness shows what we value and previews our collective future during the climate crisis: “The Annihilation of Florida: An Overlooked National Tragedy,” from @jeffvandermeer in @curaffairs. Eminently worth reading in full.
* “The Florida in my novels is not as seedy as the real Florida. It’s hard to stay ahead of the curve. Every time I write a scene that I think is the sickest thing I have ever dreamed up, it is surpassed by something that happens in real life.” – VanderMeer’s fellow Floridian Carl Hiaasen
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As we contemplate consequences, we might recall that it was on this date in 1626 that Peter Minuit, the new director of “New Netherland” for the Dutch West India Company, in what we now know as Manhattan, “purchased” the island from the the Canarsee tribe of Native Americans for a parcel of goods worth 60 guilders: roughly $24 dollars at the time, now roughly $1,000.
In the event, Native Americans in the area were unfamiliar with the European notions and definitions of ownership rights. As they understood it, water, air and land could not be traded. So scholars are convinced that both parties probably went home with totally different interpretations of the sales agreement. In any case, the Carnarsees were happy to take payment in any meaningful amount pertaining to land that was mostly controlled by their rivals, the Weckquaesgeeks.
1626 letter from Pieter Schaghen (a colleague of Minuit) reporting the purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders [source]
“Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything”*…
Perhaps, perhaps, this crisis marks an end of the “neoliberal era”.
The word “neoliberal” immediately provokes contention, but let’s not get fancy or upset here. For our purposes, neoliberalism is just a set of social heuristics: 1) that markets are in general the most capable institution for organizing human affairs; 2) that therefore, absent strong reasons to the contrary, use of market or market-like institutions should be maximized, “completed”, expanded even into domains heretofore intentionally insulated from them; and 3) that other institutions, including the state, should take a supportive, even subservient role: filling in gaps (“safety net”), addressing “market failures” that are presumed to be rare rather than pervasive, and only when a high burden of proof has been met. Any other intervention is a “distortion” to be avoided at all costs.
I think it fair to describe the period from about 1980 until the 2008 financial crisis as a neoliberal era, a period of time during which these social heuristics were widely accepted by governing elites and policy, in the United States and the broad West, was informed and shaped by them. The period from 2008 until now has been a kind of undead neoliberal era. Post Great Financial Crisis, neoliberal ideas have been discredited among much of the public and are actively contested even within governing elites. But, absent consensus on some new set of social heuristics, not much has actually changed. Material interests in the continuity of institutions shaped by neoliberalism remain strong.
Continuity now is broken. When this pandemic is “over” (whatever that means), the undead bones of neoliberal governance may well yet again gather themselves from the chaos and reconstitute the suave, smooth-talking vampire to whose predations we have grown unhappily accustomed. But they may not. We may find ourselves in a period of social experimentation and change. If so, as we diminish (not eliminate!) the role of markets, it is useful I think to understand the variety of functions that markets serve, so that framers of new institutions understand what will be excised, what may sometimes need to be replaced…
The always-provocative Steve Randy Waldman goes on to enumerate and explain four key functions that markets have, for better and/or worse, played. The entire essay is eminently worthy of a read; but for your correspondent’s money, his unpacking of the fourth role– “Markets launder history”– is the most striking:
A crucial function of status quo market institutions is to hide details surrounding the provenance of commodities, which contributes to the interchangeability or fungibility of commodities. Apple can shift the location of its production across the globe, but from a customer perspective, the only input to the process is their money which is transformed, as if by magic, into an iPhone. Outside of market processes, nothing is like this. When we produce goods for ourselves — “cottage production” as the economists call it — every item has a history. The coffee table Dad built is not the same as any other coffee table, even if it is physically not so different from some other table. As markets develop, firms try to reconstitute this kind of nostalgic, positive history, using labels like “hand-made” or “artisanal”. These attempts not very persuasive.
However, the history of commodities is not always positive. When our credit card dip magically transforms into an iPhone, it is the same iPhone whether the cobalt inside it was mined by well-treated workers or child slaves. Like Vietnam vs China vs the US, these “back ends” are interchangeable, except to the degree that one makes the product cheaper, which we prefer. But human beings are moral animals. No aspect of our experience is naturally immune from our judgments, individually and communally, and judgments have huge effects on our behavior and experience. We might not enjoy our shrimp dinner, if rather than pulling the shrimp from plastic in the freezer, it was delivered to us directly by the trafficked crewman who may have harvested it. We might feel bad, and that might impair preference satisfaction.
This function of markets is obviously essential to our neoliberal status quo… We all understand what a sausage factory is, and have some idea of why we famously might prefer not to observe one. But we all know, even if we don’t live like we know, that in fact there’s a lot of history in the goods and services we consume we’d at least be ethically squeamish about. As I write, the Federal government has just effectively coerced meatpacking workers to labor in manifestly unsafe workplaces, in the name of preserving our food supply. How should that affect our relationship to bacon? How does it, when our experience of the packaged, refrigerated product is mostly unaltered? In ordinary times, lots of us are fond of animals but do not become vegetarians. If we were required to personally kill the animals we eat, many of us would enjoy our carnivore lifestyle quite a bit less. Again, the abstraction markets offer make us richer, in the sense that we enjoy what we otherwise would not. Okay, maybe that’s gross, and we should all be vegetarians. But then what do you think about the conditions under which migrant workers harvest our garlic?
There is a case for this laundering of history. Modern production processes are complicated, involving a many stages and circumstances, each of which involves tradeoffs, conflicts, and shades of gray. If we tried as individuals to police all that, we’d do a poor job in an ethical sense and make ourselves poor in a practical sense. Instead we outsource the ethical choices to state regulation of production and trade. Then so long as commodities are produced and sold in legal markets, every purchase comes with a dollop of absolution. Individually, we might not all agree on the choices the state makes, but hey, this is a democracy right? On the whole, the theory goes, our choices will be more effective when they are collective and enforced, rather than if we tried to rely on more perfectly individualized consumer judgments, boycotts or such. So ethics as well as expedience are on the side of this arrangement.
Of course if neoliberalism is defined in part by an attitude of state subservience towards markets, perhaps, in a neoliberal era, it should not surprise us if expedience came to eclipse ethics. Many of us now think that modern supply chains are sexy Apple packaging wrapped around horrifically ugly production arrangements, and that legal and financial markets often serve to wrap theft and extraction in pretty paper bow ties. This “function” of markets is part of what motivates us to challenge them. But it remains to be answered how much and just how we might want to retain the blissful ignorance delivered by virgin commodities. Inscribing all the history markets erase on a blockchain or whatever, and then relying on individuals to evaluate the ethics of every stage of production of every good and service they consume, does not seem workable or effective. On the other hand, if markets launder history too effectively, that short-circuits the capacity of democratic politics to insist upon ethical production, as voters are shielded from the harms of cruel supply chains but enjoy the benefits of lower prices. Some variant of the status quo, where ethical choices are collectively made and enforced by states, seems like the only way forward. (Perhaps I am too uncreative?) It’s one thing to speak abstractly about retrenching from neoliberalism, with its corrosive effect on collective action in pursuit of moral ends. But what, concretely, do the political institutions and processes look like that would render it ethical for us to enjoy the goods and services available for purchase as though they had no history? What would be the trade-offs in what we perceive as prosperity if we instated those institutions?
Do read the full piece on his blog, Interfluidity: “Four functions of markets.”
See also “Neoliberalism: the idea that swallowed the world” and “Neoliberalism” [from whence, the image above]
* Benjamin Graham (legendary “value investor,” mentor of Warren Buffett)
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As we bid and ask, we might recall that it was on this date in 1626 that Peter Minuit, the new director of “New Netherland” for the Dutch West India Company, landed there– that’s to say, on what we now know as Manhattan Island. Later that year, he “purchased” the island from the the Canarsee tribe of Native Americans for a parcel of goods worth 60 guilders: roughly $24 dollars at the time, now roughly $1,000. In the event, the Carnarsees were happy to take payment in any meaningful amount for land that was mostly controlled by their rivals, the Weckquaesgeeks.
1626 letter from Pieter Schaghen (a colleague of Minuit) reporting the purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders
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