Herbal Medicine Business Sets Firm Roots in Utah

Before Tom Murdock founded a business that would grow into the nation’s largest maker of herbal medicines, he found inspiration in Arizona’s high desert.

It was in the late 1960s and Murdock’s wife, Lavoli, was gravely ill with cancer that hadn’t responded to conventional treatments. Murdock had heard about a Navajo medicine man who touted a desert chaparral shrub as a remedy for ailments from colds to cancer. Willing to try anything, Murdock scavenged the desert for the plant and made it into tea for his wife to drink.

According to the story told for years by the Murdock family, Lavoli’s health returned and she lived for many more years. The experience gave root to a business.

Convinced of the healing powers of herbs, Murdock began hawking his horse-pill-size chaparral pills to health food stores in Utah and the West. He called his company “Nature’s Way,” and the folksy tale of Lavoli and the medicine man became part of the company’s official history.

Today, Nature’s Way is run by Tom Murdock’s son, Ken, and it processes 350 different herbs and 100 vitamin products in an impressive array of combinations.

Chaparral is no longer on the product list. The company took it off the market years ago after federal regulators linked its use to possible liver damage in humans. Although that setback may raise some questions about the company’s founding story, it hardly seems to have dented its business.

Nature’s Way headquarters at the base of the Wasatch Mountains, about 45 miles south of Salt Lake City, houses the nation’s largest herbal processing plant. At the factory’s entrance, visitors walk through a “hall of values,” where colored banners hang from a sky-lit ceiling bearing slogans such as “Honesty and Integrity” and “Respect for All People.”

Inside the plant--about the size of a Home Depot store--there is the sound of pill bottles tumbling along conveyor belts and big stainless steel drums blending concoctions of barley grass, wild Siberian ginseng, kava and other herbs shipped here from around the world.

Utah is the heart of the nation’s dietary supplement industry, and these are sunny times for companies like Nature’s Way, Nature’s Herbs, Nature’s Sunshine, Solaray, Nuskin and Weider Nutrition.

Thanks to the soaring popularity of alternative therapies of all kinds, the capsules, teas, tonics and creams these companies sell have sprouted into a $1-billion-a-year business in Utah, bigger even than the skiing trade.

In turn, the state’s members of Congress, particularly Utah’s Republican senior senator, Orrin G. Hatch, have served as a powerful shield for the industry against what it sees as excessive government regulation. Hatch personally uses dietary supplements and has invested in a company that sells herbal products.

Hatch contends that he is defending an important industry for his state, and that at a time when rising health care costs are a national concern, support of businesses that push prevention and nutrition makes good sense.

A Confluence of Favorable Factors

How Utah came to be the “Silicon Valley of herbs” is not exactly clear. Observers here cite a variety of factors.

Simple entrepreneurship is one factor. As a handful of companies such as Nature’s Way and Nature’s Herbs grew from boutique operations into large, global enterprises, former employees of those firms left to start their own companies. And other businesses were founded to supply materials and services to the larger companies.

Another influence, though, has been the culture of the state’s dominant Mormon population. The Mormon emphasis on self-reliance, spirituality in medicine and healthful living complemented a business whose leaders preached similar principles, experts on the growth of the industry say.

“In Utah, you’d tend to find people who turn more toward homeopathic or alternative medicine,” said Robert L. Millet, dean of religious education at Brigham Young University, who noted that the tendency is not a result of any specific teachings of the church.

“I see a correlation [with Mormonism], but not a causation. I think it has more to do with the kind of people who would live here.”

Another early influence on the state’s natural products industry was a colorful and controversial herbalist named John Christopher, who ran a natural healing school near Salt Lake City in the late 1960s.

“Dr. Christopher’s” herbal formulas were used in some of the earliest products marketed by such companies as Nature’s Way and are still sold under that name, although Nature’s Way dropped its line of “Dr. Christopher’s” products last year.

Christopher was an unpopular figure with the state’s medical establishment. He was forced to leave town amid repeated accusations of quackery and practicing medicine without a license. The charges landed the silver-haired herbalist in jail a few times.

But much like Ken Murdock, nearly everyone in Utah’s dietary supplement business seems to have a testimonial to share about the benefits of unorthodox therapies or healthy living.

One industry executive tells how her chronic infections responded to bee pollen treatment. Another tells how her son’s chronic ear infections failed to respond to antibiotics but were cured with cod liver oil and a health diet.

“The heritage [of alternative medicine] may have come from the Mormons, but it has remained a characteristic of this state,” said Rae Howard, president of Health Forum, a political lobbying group for the dietary supplement industry.

Tea Leads to Trouble

Perhaps it’s no accident that Utah claims a curious footnote in law enforcement history: the nation’s first known conviction for driving under the influence of the herb kava.

The driver in question, a 44-year-old native of the South Pacific islands of Tonga, pleaded guilty to driving while impaired after being pulled over and admitting to having drunk “about 16” cups of tea made from kava--a legal substance used as a beverage for recreational and religious use in Polynesian cultures.

For years, many of the products made and sold in Utah fell into a kind of never-never land of government regulation. They weren’t regulated like prescription or over-the-counter drugs, for which the government requires proof of safety and effectiveness. Nor were they regulated as foods, which must be safe to ingest and are required to meet manufacturing standards.

That legal limbo led to a state of near constant warfare between the federal Food and Drug Administration and the state’s natural-products companies. Every so often, FDA investigators would swoop in and seize a dietary supplement product. Most of the major firms in Utah had been targets at one time or another.

Four years ago, however, with help from Hatch, the industry claimed victory in the so-called “vitamin wars,” defeating pro-regulation forces led by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles).

After a campaign in which the companies and their supporters--backed by a number of Hollywood celebrities--deluged members of Congress with calls and letters, Congress passed the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health Education Act.

The new law gave companies like Nature’s Way far greater latitude in the claims they can make about their products.

The companies are still prohibited from claiming that their products “diagnose, prevent, treat or cure” diseases or illnesses. But they are free, for example, to advertise the herb echinacea as “promoting general well-being during cold and flu season” so long as they do not specifically say the product “helps cure colds.”

Herbal Medicine Goes Mainstream

Although the law requires that companies’ claims be backed by some scientific evidence, it doesn’t specify how strong that evidence must be.

The new law gave the company the freedom to advertise its products to health-conscious baby boomers used to reading and comparing labels.

As a result, “the image of Birkenstocked hippies growing their own herbs is quickly being replaced by the Silicon Valley executive who has done his or her homework on the benefits of regular ginkgo consumption,” said a recent newsletter from Citizens for Health, a Boulder, Colo.-based organization that advocates supplements and other herbal products.

Utah also provided the backdrop for a recent courtroom battle that served as a key legal test of the FDA’s regulatory powers under the new law. The FDA lost.

The agency was seeking to ban Pharmanex, a Simi Valley dietary supplements firm, from marketing its Cholestin as a cholesterol-lowering product. The main ingredient in Cholestin is a red-yeast rice powder that contains lovastatin, a chemical that is a key ingredient of a cholesterol-lowering drug made by Merck & Co.

The agency contended that because Cholestin contained the same active ingredient as a prescription drug, it should have to meet the same safety and testing standards as a drug.

But U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball disagreed, and in June ordered the FDA to lift its ban on Cholestin. Pharmanex, he wrote in his order, had “raised substantial and serious questions” regarding the legality of the FDA’s interpretation” of the drug law.

The dietary supplement industry views the Cholestin decision as validation of its arguments that herbal products--even if they have effects similar to those of prescription drugs--should be largely free of FDA scrutiny.

It could result in companies becoming bolder in the claims they make for herbs and other products, giving a further boost to sales that already are going great guns.

Since passage of the 1994 law, sales of dietary supplements have roughly doubled, by some estimates. The handful of U.S. vitamin and herb companies whose stock is available to the public, such as Nature’s Sunshine, are boasting record sales and profits. Several other companies are taking advantage of good times to go public by selling stock for the first time.

Now, says Murdock, with the industry having triumphed in its battle with regulators and with its market rapidly expanding, the main problem the companies face is managing growth.

In particular, Murdock says he worries about competitors that are going too far in claiming curative powers for their products, setting up the industry for a possible backlash.

As the industry grows and enters the American mainstream, it needs to find better methods for self-policing, he says. “If we don’t do so, there are a lot of people waiting for something bad to happen to this industry so they can jump in and change the law to regulate us more.”

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About This Series

Sunday--Growing at an astonishing rate, the alternative medicine movement has moved into the mainstream. But do these treatments work?

Monday--Independent laboratory tests raise questions about whether herbal supplements live up to their advertised potency.

Plus--Alternative practices: what are they, how do they work? In the Health section.

Today--How Utah has become the headquarters of the nation’s herbal supplement business.

Wednesday--HMOs and hospitals are jumping onto the alternative medicine trend, but often are cutting corners as they do so, experts warn.