Bad Medicine: Life Before the FDA

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This product is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any disease. Fall is just around the corner and home is the center of it all. At Ashley, seasonal decorating is a breeze with their range of designs and materials. Snuggle up on a family-friendly sectional or an ultra-modern sofa or gather outside and enjoy the crisp, cool air with a new fire pit or conversation set. From minor refreshes to total overhauls, Ashley has the essentials to make your home fall functional and fabulous.

Shop in-store or visit ashley.com today. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including your stories. Send them to ouramericanstories.com.

They're some of our favorites. And while you're there, we'd love to have you consider donating. We work hard every day to bring you terrific stories about a good and decent country and try to give you relief from the day's bad news and the debate of the day. We're a nonprofit. Do a little. Do a lot. Do your part. If you like what you hear, please send a donation our way to ouramericanstories.com. Click the donate button. Tell friends about what we do, too, and share our stories with others. We're doing our best to bring people together around a show that simply doesn't do politics, nor do anything, but tell good and beautiful stories about a good and beautiful country. Up next, a story on medicine, but not the kind you'd expect to cure anything.

Here's our own Monty Montgomery with his story. Snake oil, heroes, elixirs, patent medicine. Today, we think of medicine as a pretty buttoned up industry. Everything is tested.

It just works. But that hasn't always been the case. Here's Darren Glassberg, executive director of the Mobile Medical Museum, with more on these medicines that claim to do everything, but didn't do much except line the pockets of their creators with cold, hard cash. So we use the term patent medicine to refer to over-the-counter medicine that was sold in the years after the Civil War up until the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906 and the passage of new labeling laws and all of that. During this time, the drug industry was basically totally unregulated, and so you didn't even have to be a practicing doctor.

You could be anybody and develop this concoction, apply for a patent, and then sell it over the open market. Some of these medicines had some legitimate uses, and others didn't. The names of these medicines were as interesting as what they claimed to cure.

Benor's electromagnetic bathing fluid claimed to cure cholera, epilepsy, scarlet fever, neurosis, paralysis, hip diseases, and female complaints, among other things, while Solar Teacher claimed to restore life in the event of sudden death. But the most popular patent medicine of all time came from the swamps of the American South. An interesting one that came kind of late in the game is called Hadakol, and it was a patent medicine that was invented in 1943 by Dudley LeBlanc, who was a state senator in Louisiana and a two-time candidate for governor.

And he had no medical or pharmaceutical training, of course. The name Hadakol was an acronym for the Happy Day Company of LeBlanc, so that's where the name comes from. This became one of the most popular patent medicines of all time.

In fact, by the year 1951, it was the second largest advertiser in the U.S. after Coca-Cola. So LeBlanc gave lots of interviews about the origins of this medicine, but what he claimed is that he went to the doctor for some foot pain, and he was given this medicine by a nurse, and he basically claimed to have stolen the recipe for Hadakol from this doctor's office. But the ingredients were just, you know, various B vitamins, minerals, honey, 12% alcohol, that was like the real, you know, most impactful ingredient, and diluted hydrochloric acid, which enhanced the effects of the alcohol.

So basically, you know, this kind of just knocked you right out. Now, he claimed, as many of these inventors of these patent medicines, he claimed that this drug would have all kinds of effects, helping to cure, you know, cancer, diabetes, but mainly it was taken as a pain medication. LeBlanc was known for his really aggressive marketing strategies, so he organized this medicine show with all these great stars in the late 1940s. He wrote a country hit called the Hadakol Boogie, and Bill Nettles and his Dixie Blue Boys had a version of this song. It was later covered by, I think, Jerry Lee Lewis, you know, and shortly after that, things started to kind of fall off the tracks. By 1951, right at the peak of the success of the company, it came out that LeBlanc owed millions of dollars in tax debt and unpaid bills, and the Federal Trade Commission accused him of false advertising, and, you know, he got lots of bad publicity, and he was forced to sell the company, and it basically not only ruined the company, but also his political career.

So he had a really high peak and then a very fast burnout, and that was the end of the story. Backtracking a little bit now, you heard Darren mention that Hadakol contained a decent amount of booze in it, along with other things to knock you out. It turns out not only was this good for sales post prohibition, but patent medicine was one of the only ways to actually get risky after the Volstead Act went into effect. They still prescribed it because they could make a lot of money. It costs $3 for a prescription and three or four more dollars to fill the prescription, and you could get a prescription filled for one pint every ten days.

So this was a moneymaker for a lot of doctors. You needed a prescription to purchase alcohol for medicinal purposes. This bourbon, Old Taylor, it comes from Kentucky, and it was named after Colonel Edmund Hayes Taylor, who was related to General Zachary Taylor, and he built this huge distillery in the form of a castle. And for a long time it was closed, but it recently opened up again as a distillery.

You can look it up online. It's called Castle and Key Distillery. I'd like to visit it sometime, but that's the story.

And a great job as always by Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to Darren Glassbrook, executive director of the Mobile Medical Museum. And it's hard to imagine a time, well actually maybe not so hard, to imagine a time when there was no FDA and people just got to sell anything to anybody for any reason. And who knows the kind of junk that got sold.

And by the way, even with the FDA, look at how far the miracles of modern medicine have taken us from what we thought were cures back in the day to now. And by the way, what a story about a character that, well, America is filled with characters. Dudley LeBlanc. At the peak, LeBlanc owed the IRS millions. The FTC accused him of false advertising, and he burned out fast. But he had also been the second largest advertiser in the United States behind Coca-Cola.

And this is up till 1951, selling Hadakol, which is of course short for the Happy Day Company of LeBlanc. And my goodness, the whole thing just sounds like a movie in the making. This character, his life, and a little bit of a flashpoint into America and American hucksterism. Because there's a rich tradition of hucksterism, a fine line between P.T. Barnum and, of course, men like this. And we'd love to hear your stories about people like this, colorful people from your town, from your town's history. By the way, not evil people.

We're not looking for evil people. Colorful people is how we like to call it here on Our American Stories. Send those stories to OurAmericanStories.com. Every town, every state has them. Here are your stories with us again at OurAmericanStories.com.

The story of Dudley LeBlanc and the story of Hadakol here on Our American Stories. Fall is just around the corner and home is the center of it all. At Ashley, seasonal decorating's a breeze with their range of designs and materials. Snuggle up on a family-friendly sectional or an ultra-modern sofa. Or gather outside and enjoy the crisp, cool air with a new fire pit or conversation set. From minor refreshes to total overhauls, Ashley has the essentials to make your home fall functional and fabulous.

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