Selling the Dream

27m

A chapter from Jane Marie’s forthcoming book. Preorder at jane-marie.com.

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Pushkin.

Hey, dream listeners, it's Jane, and I'm back with the Dream Season 3.5.

Just kidding.

But kind of not.

That's what I've been calling this.

It's an excerpt of my audiobook.

We're going to listen to chapter 7 of the audiobook, which is kind of like a podcast.

It's available for pre-order right now.

Selling the dream, you can get it anywhere.

And pre-order the audiobook too.

It makes a huge difference for some reason that I don't quite understand.

But please go do that.

and enjoy chapter 7 of selling the dream.

In the spring of 2020, amid the backdrop of panic surrounding the emerging coronavirus pandemic, casual users of social media may have noticed a new type of post appearing in their feeds.

This is to inform us all that the pH for coronavirus varies from 5.5 to 8.5.

All we need to do to beat coronavirus, we need to take more of an alkaline foods that are above the above pH level of the virus, some of which are lemon, lime, tangerine, orange.

Hashtag COVID.

The above is from a real post shared by a distributor for doTERRA, an extremely popular MLM based in Utah that produces and markets essential oils and proprietary essential oil blends for use in homeopathic remedies and aromatherapy.

This is purely anecdotal, but chances are if you've seen an MLM product on store shelves or at an Earth Mother's House, it's from doTERRA.

Despite it's being against company policy to sell its products at traditional retail outlets, you'll find their oil collections at health spas, crystal shops, and alternative medicine clinics, adding an air of legitimacy to the brand.

But make no mistake, doTERRA is an MLM.

Although doTERRA got its start marketing its oils simply as more pure than its competitors, over the past few years, distributors have begun making increasingly bold, often downright bogus claims about their health benefits.

The government has taken notice.

Given the difficulty the Amway decision created, the feds in recent years have gone after MLMs less for being pyramid schemes and more for making false claims.

During the Ebola outbreak of 2014, the FTC issued doTERRA a warning after complaints rolled in that certain distributors were advertising that doTERRA oils could combat the disease, even though it should be noted there is still currently no approved cure for it.

Oregano is effective in inactivating MNV, non-enveloped murine norovirus, within one hour of exposure, wrote one doTERRA distributor on social media.

Some of the primary uses for oregano include athlete's foot, candida, canker sores, Ebola virus, intestinal parasites, MRSA, ringworm, staph infection, viral infections, warts, and whooping cough.

It might be soothing to think that an oil derived from plants you can grow in any home herb garden could cure serious disease, but the suggestion is potentially deadly.

Not only might it lead patients to avoid legitimate and successful treatments for the false hope found in a bottle of oily perfume, but the oils can cause serious harm to the body.

Over the past 20 years, poison control centers across the country have seen a steep rise in calls regarding essential oils.

In Tennessee, the number doubled between 2011 and 2016.

and most calls were regarding poisonings in children.

In 2018, the state of Georgia received a record-breaking 1,000 calls involving essential oils.

Not only can they cause skin irritation, but if ingested, as a lot of essential oil companies recommend, many popular oils, including eucalyptus, tea tree, camphor, thyme, and wintergreen, are toxic to humans.

The list of what could happen to you or your child if you drink them is long and includes vomiting, respiratory failure, cerebral swelling, seizures, and even coma.

But that hasn't stopped essential oil makers and their purveyors from continuing to loudly preach the benefits of oils as part of a healthy diet.

doTERRA has even gone so far as to offer empty capsules, like the ones pharmacists use, made of inert vegetable ingredients, as part of its product line so users can ingest the oil in pill form.

The only warning doTERRA issues?

If using with essential oils, it is not recommended to pre-fill capsules for future use.

as the properties of the essential oils will compromise the vegetable capsule.

The government is well aware of the danger of this sort of marketing, which is why the FTC sent a letter to doTERRA early on during the COVID pandemic in April 2020, telling the company to knock it off.

It is unlawful under the FTC Act 15 USC Section 41 et Seek to advertise that a product can prevent, treat, or cure human disease unless you possess competent and reliable scientific evidence substantiating that the claims are true at the time they are made, the letter read.

The letter went on to tell the company to stop making such claims, to tell their distributors to stop making such claims, and to email the agency's COVID-19 task force describing the specific actions you have taken to address the FTC's concerns.

doTERRA was hardly alone in needing a legal refresher.

The FTC sent out hundreds of letters to companies, MLMs and otherwise, that tried to profit on the fears of COVID-19 by claiming their products offered some magical defense against or cure for the virus.

In the fight against COVID-19, keep moving every day and eating healthy, read an ad from a distributor of Isogenics International, an MLM that sells weight loss products such as protein bars and shakes.

Isogenic shakes boost your immunity 500%.

Hashtag virus corona worried, read a social media post from a distributor for Plexus Worldwide, another MLM that sells nutritional supplements.

I've been boosting my immune system for several years with high-quality Plexus supplements.

You can too.

Hashtag Plexus provides excellent all-natural supplements that truly work.

Be sensible, not fearful.

Have no fear, Plexus Worldwide is here.

The FTC letters all ended with the directive to immediately stop publishing such claims, either directly or via distributors, and to respond within 48 hours letting the agency know the companies had done so.

Step right up.

MLMs present a unique challenge to regulation for authorities.

While the FTC has the authority to go after companies engaging in deceptive marketing, such as saying cinnamon oil can cure diabetes, in practice the FTC has little power.

Ensuring that individual companies do what they're told requires a lot of resources, and as we saw in the discussion of Carl Renborg and Neutralite, the law still provides a lot of gray area as to what makes a health claim illegal.

Before 1906, when the first national legislation appeared around food and drug safety, sellers were not prohibited from making false therapeutic claims on packaging and in sales pitches, and they didn't have to provide proof of what was in any food or drugs they marketed.

One could just bottle up whatever, pitch it to the public, and make some cash.

Capitalism was being tested in its purest, newest form.

The market would decide if something was a good product.

Spurred on by industrialization, the gold rush, a transcontinental railroad, and a slew of diseases no one could cure because penicillin hadn't been discovered, snake oil salesmen flourished across America.

Historians still debate the origin of the term snake oil, but the most agreed-upon story is that when Chinese laborers came to America to help build that transcontinental railroad, they brought with them some remedies to soothe their aching bodies after endless days of brutal labor.

One of those remedies was said to come from water snakes, and if you rubbed it on your joints, you'd feel better.

Come to find out, the omega-3 fatty acids in actual snake oil, like those in fish oil, have been found in some studies to rival NSAIDs, such as aspirin and ibuprofen in their anti-inflammatory effects.

So there was something to this treatment, but since no one knew what it was and water snakes weren't available everywhere, other versions started popping up that contained God knows what, and hucksters started selling those across the country.

The most famous of these salesmen was Clark Stanley, and his backstory won't surprise you at this point.

Born in 1854 in Texas, he grew up to become a ranch hand, but decided he'd rather be rich and took a short educational trip to a Hopi village to learn natural medicine, or so he said.

He began concocting his own snake oils and wrote a 41-page handbook about them and about himself and about being a cowboy.

He used the book at sales presentations to look smart and accomplished.

I mean, how many people can claim to be authors?

LOL at me.

He was definitely skilled at one thing, though, ripping people off.

Dressed in a fancy suit and christening himself the Rattlesnake King, Stanley began touring the country chopping heads off rattlesnakes in front of huge crowds while preaching the benefits of his snake oil liniment, which he said could cure, among dozens of other things, neuralgia, lame back, toothache, sprains, frostbite, bruises, sore throats, and snake bites.

He He got so good at this, he was given a stage at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The bottles sold for about 50 cents apiece, which is close to $14 in 2021 money, about in line with the cheaper essential oils you can get today.

In 1917, 11 years after Congress created the Food and Drug Act to protect consumers from people like Stanley, His tinctures were found to contain no snake oil whatsoever, just mineral oil, beef fat, and turpentine, along with some culinary spices such as capsaicin, which is found in hot peppers.

Gross.

His business was shuttered for good and he was fined $20 or the equivalent of the cost of 40 bottles of his snake oil liniment.

From there, snake oil became a catch-all term for any vitamin, supplement, or medicine, making unsubstantiated claims.

The next year would see an explosion of businesses like Stanley's, thanks to a disaster closely resembling the pandemic we face today, the 1918 influenza outbreak.

Newspapers and magazines were chock full of advertisements for cure-alls or preventative tinctures that promised to eradicate the Spanish flu.

It was caused by a novel H1N1 virus that was thought to come from birds, though similar to the ongoing debate around coronavirus, that hasn't been definitively confirmed.

It's said that one-third of the world's population became infected over two years with over 50 million deaths.

Everyone wanted to find a cure or preventative concoction.

There was a beef gravy, yes, beef gravy, that boasted it increases nutrition and maintains vitality in the system and thus an effective resistance is established against the attacks of the influenza organism.

People bought it, literally.

In Wisconsin, a doctor was known for administering camphor oil intravenously to desperate patients.

Considering that the most common legitimate pharmaceutical prescriptions you could get included heroin, cocaine, and opium, it's easy to see how other scary-sounding treatments could enter the mainstream.

Though the government did crack down in fits and starts on the sale of these supplements, the industry continued to thrive.

The great danger today is that those messages of alternative cures can spread much faster thanks to social media.

and thanks to the massive modern wellness industry.

Spurred by dissatisfaction with and earned distrust distrust of the traditional medical community and big pharma, wellness culture has risen, made popular by celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and her brand Goop, by a whole host of social media influencers, as well as by companies such as doTERRA that capitalize on our desire to feel better and look better naturally.

The industry is estimated to be worth over $4 trillion today.

with no signs of slowing.

The 2020 Netflix docu-series Unwell explores the rise of this industry and the impact it's had on our health and our wallets.

The first episode is entirely dedicated to essential oils, and doTERRA is a main character.

In the episode, one diamond-ranked doTERRA rep, Allison Huish, pitches new recruits by telling them a harrowing story about how she was diagnosed with a brain tumor at age 12.

She underwent surgery, but then her tumor couldn't be treated with chemo.

and the idea of radiation sounded scary, she says.

To her credit, it is.

But Huiesch was so scared that when a friend of the family recommended treating her cancer with frankincense and clove oils, which they said had anti-cancer properties, her family began administering the oils daily.

She also took oregano and tea tree oil to fight bacteria and viruses, she says.

But her family made sure never to tell her doctors about this self-medicating.

My mom was very careful that she never brought up that we were using essential oils, Huish explains to a room full of potential recruits.

If she had told my neurosurgeon that, he could have easily called child protective services.

Hot tip.

If you're aware you're doing something to your child that would get CPS involved, stop doing it.

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Huish concludes the story.

And ever since then, I've used essential oils.

On screen, we can see that she is alive, so confirmation bias kicks in and one might think, wow, yes, the oils worked.

Immediately after her pitch, some of the women begin asking how to treat other ailments, such as diabetes with doTERRA.

Essential oils help clean up the blood, but we're not supposed to say that essential oils cured this disease.

That is due to the FDA.

Our healthcare system doesn't really like essential oils.

It takes away from our big pharma and all of those sales.

That is some slippery and skillful language, with Huish basically saying what she can't be saying lest she get in trouble with law enforcement.

The spiel about our healthcare system not really liking essential oils is a cornerstone of many MLM supplement pitches these days.

The government doesn't want you to have this, so you can't buy it at the drugstore.

You can only get it from me, your friendly neighborhood oregano oil dealer.

One huge hole in this logic.

If the oils worked, wouldn't this evil big pharma create a monopoly on them and mark them up and get richer?

Never mind that anti-establishment thinking often only goes as far as declaring the powers that be evildoers.

There's no burden to explain how or why they'd want to deceive the masses.

Just think of the idea of the Illuminati.

Why do they exist?

To be in charge.

Of people and money.

And seen.

Huish was right about one thing.

The government doesn't want people to say that essential oils are miracle cures.

But it's not because they compete with big pharma.

Quite the contrary.

While there is some, albeit inconclusive, research that shows certain oils can help improve mood or relieve stress, There is absolutely no evidence that they have any role in combating illness or disease.

Unfortunately, the very selling structure of MLMs, though legitimized by the 1979 Amway case, still makes it easy, if not imperative, for bad or just clueless actors to act illegally.

That's not to say that individual sellers intend to hurt their customers.

These sellers often believe they're hype, but harm is harm either way.

Think of all the blood diamonds you have lying around.

In 2018, the FTC published Business Guidance Concerning Multilevel Marketing, a kind of cheat sheet about what not to do if you want to stay out of the regulator's crosshairs.

Item 15 provides a perfect example of how much the FTC can actually do and how non-threatening their threats can be.

It begins.

The FTC has long supported industry self-regulation as an efficient way to secure consumer benefits and promote a robust and competitive marketplace.

MLM self-regulation may create these same types of benefits.

The FTC is saying that it doesn't want to get in the way of a free market, it's not trying to hinder business in any way, but it does place a lot of trust in these companies and it is watching to make sure that trust isn't violated.

The FTC goes on to say as much.

Belonging to a self-regulatory organization, however, does not shield MLMs engaged in unfair and deceptive practices from FTC law enforcement action.

Under appropriate circumstances, the FTC can and will bring law enforcement actions against companies that claim claim to follow self-regulatory guidelines, but in practice do not.

Similarly, the FTC can and will bring law enforcement actions against companies that, despite following such guidelines, nonetheless violate the FTC Act.

In other words, we're trusting you to follow the rules, and if you don't, you'll be in trouble.

And if you pretend you didn't know you were breaking the rules, that's on you, not us.

So we trust you, but we don't have to trust you.

And besides, who can stop independent distributors from saying whatever they want on their private social media accounts?

They are the owners of their own small businesses after all.

A letter to the president of a company surely can't make its way all the way down to each new recruit.

And remember, MLMs place responsibility for failure or illegal activity on the distributors, not the company or its products.

Any CEO of an MLM can throw their hands up and say, well, we can't control what independent distributors say.

Besides, right here on our website, it says that's a no-no.

The Amway rules paved the way for this passing of the buck and made it standard practice.

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This has been the case ever since Carl Renborg and Neutralite encouraged distributors to dress up as doctors and plant themselves in local pharmacies with that broad health checklist to present to customers.

No one at Neutralite said you had to do this to sell their vitamins, but if you wanted to succeed, That's up to you.

Carl knew he was onto something, but didn't live to see the day alternative therapies would so publicly and successfully compete with mainstream medicine.

The wellness arm of the MLM industry offers a unique case study into what can happen when an MLM run by people without medical degrees gets into the business of selling so-called healing products.

One of those people can be credited with creating both of the top essential oil companies in the world.

The MLM that started it all was called Young Living, founded in 1993 by Gary Young and his then wife, Mary.

According to company lore, Young had become a devout practitioner of essential oils after a logging accident in his early 20s left him unable to walk.

After two failed suicide attempts, Young tried a cure of drinking water and lemon juice exclusively for reportedly the better half of a year.

This is now known as the master cleanse and is not recommended for more than 10 days.

Young claimed the liquid diet got him up and moving again, and he decided to devote his life to providing relief to others both physically and financially.

There's no evidence anywhere to back up this story.

In 1981, the then 32-year-old opened a natural health clinic outside Spokane, Washington.

With only a high school education and a few uncompleted classes in naturopathy, he opened Golden Six Health World, a facility that offered a variety of alternative medicine services, including some that he himself developed, such as taking blood samples from patients to to interpret them, meaning examine them for signs of trouble.

How Theranos-y.

He said he could detect cancer cells and had developed a holistic regimen to cure the disease.

One of the services offered at the clinic was a blood analysis for pregnant women to see if they were getting the vitamins and minerals they needed.

And its popularity led him to offer these clients water births at the clinic.

On September 4th, 1982, Young attempted to deliver his own daughter, but he and Mary, who also had no medical training, kept her underwater for more than an hour.

The child died, and the Washington State Department of Licensing and local police staged an undercover sting operation of the facility, which landed Young in the local jail for the night, charged with practicing medicine without a license, which was only a misdemeanor, if you can believe it.

Later, Young moved to Tijuana and opened another clinic, where he developed a blood crystallization test and something he called orthomolecular cell therapy, both of which he claimed could be used to treat or cure most of the world's ailments.

He promised cancer patients that after a $6,000 three-week stay in his clinic, their cancer would be in remission, but for $10,000, they could be completely cured forever.

Word spread through Southern California about this miracle worker just south of the border.

Tijuana is still a popular destination for Southern Californians looking for medical procedures cheaper than those in Los Angeles or San Diego, cheaper and more experimental.

After hearing about a number of Angelinos who had sought treatment at his clinic, in 1987, a Los Angeles Times reporter decided to send Young a blood sample.

Except, tee, it was cat blood.

Young diagnosed aggressive cancer.

The reporter followed up with chicken blood.

in which Young found signs of an inflamed liver.

The fake doctor wrote, It appears as though you've recently undergone a high level of upset in your life, which has weakened your immune response considerably.

We recommend a supervised program of cleansing, detox, and rebuilding.

Again, this was the recommended course of action for a chicken, but Young didn't know that.

Young's interest in essential oils developed after he met a French lavender distiller at a New Age and alternative medicine conference in the early 90s.

Young traveled to France to learn distillation techniques, and in 1993, after returning to the States, he and his wife founded Young Living Essential Oils.

Essential oils were gaining popularity, and enough competitors were out there to inspire his unique, niche marketing pitch.

Essential oils, but make it Mormon.

The pitch worked, and today there are over 2 million distributors of Young Living Oils in the United States.

In 2020, the company claimed $2.2 billion in revenues.

To this day, after his untimely, ironic death by stroke at age 68 in 2018, the Health Guru's Company publishes a massive handbook extolling its oils as essential to one's health.

It outlines in great detail how the frequencies of specific oils can alter the frequency of the human body, bringing it to equilibrium where everything from anorexia to diabetes to cancer cannot thrive.

The book also details the extremely intensive and confusing distillation process, using a hodgepodge of of quasi-scientific sounding jargon to help explain why young living oils are so pure and why anything less than a pure unadulterated oil could pose significant danger to one's health.

The index for personal use includes entries on everything from yeast infections to strep throat to strokes, uterine cancer, and West Nile virus, as well as autism, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS.

One thing stands out about the book above all.

The overwhelming majority of footnotes cite the Bible.

It drives me nuts.

Members of my family sell, but more important and scary, they use young living oils to treat all kinds of ailments.

After reading the handbook pretty much front to back, I want to scream my concerns at them.

Oil cannot cure Lyme disease, even if there's a quote in the Bible written 2,000 years before Lyme disease was even discovered.

Infuriating.

This book is doing too much.

Like those claims made in that 5-pound, 640-page spiral-bound text, Young himself was a bit extra.

In videos his company posts on YouTube, he stands before crowds preaching the gospel of Jesus alongside the gospel of essential oils, reminiscent of a televangelist, though more overtly capitalistic.

Before his death in 2018, he was planning to build an amusement park.

featuring a monument with his face carved in stone.

He operated clinics in South America where it was said that patients could receive gallbladder surgery or intravenous essential oil treatments from the man himself, by the hand of God.

As he grew hardened in this approach, some in the company became disillusioned and irritated by Young's bombast.

One of those most over it was David Sterling, then COO of Young Living.

He left in 2008 and took with him some of the company's top brass, the director of scientific education and support, the senior director of new market development, a regional business director, and the director of events.

Together, they launched doTERRA.

Gutted, Young Living eventually filed a lawsuit against them in 2013, claiming they falsely advertised their oils as 100% pure when they contained man-made materials.

A shit slinging back and forth lasted for years.

with each side attacking the veracity of the other's marketing materials and claiming disparagement.

But then Gary Young kicked the bucket, and the contentious relationship cooled amid booming success for both companies.

While Young Living remains a godly enterprise, doTERRA markets itself as much more mainstream, advising customers to add a few drops of lemon oil to homemade cleaning products or to put lavender oil in a diffuser to help aid sleep and reduce stress.

Other than that, the two companies' product lines are virtually the same.

and both are wildly successful.

Although you can purchase essential oils at the grocery store or on the internet, the two MLMs are by far the biggest companies in the industry, with more than a billion dollars in annual sales each.

Given the selling structures of the companies, it's impossible to know how many of those dollars are profits or are made from retail sales to people outside the organizations.

So that was a chapter from my new book, Selling the Dream, available March 12th, but you can pre-order it right now and I'm supposed to beg you to do that for I don't know know why, but I guess it matters a lot.

So go pre-order the audiobook or the hardcover book and then hit me in my DMs and tell me if I did a good job.

Okay, love you.

Bye.

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