When Did Scammy Patent Medicines Become A Republican Thing?

A sleazy Democratic tradition changes sides.

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........

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