Tuesday afternoon came. All the buyers had left, any business to be done was done Monday at lunch, and no one around needed to be impressed. Cleanup for the booths had started. The big double decker constructions were disassembled, display cases broken down, and everything put back in its boxes and shipped back to home base. The merchandise was another story. Since these are the manufacturers, their cost might be 20 cents per pound to make, and $3.20 per pound to ship to the show. It'd be another $3.20 a pound to ship it back, but only 20 cents to leave it all here and make more at home. So all the merchandise was up for grabs. In other words, Supermarket Sweep.
Locals had it fine: grab the stuff, go to their cars and cram the trunk, come back for more. But this was in Chicago, so any stuff I grabbed would have to make its way back 1000 + miles. Everyone at Private Label was allowed one small box of personal stuff to ship back; everything else would have to be shoved in my luggage. Space would have to be maximized; so much for that paper towel ziggurat I had my eye on.
I had been covering the nonfood section of the show, so I had scoped out that territory pretty well. Among the coffee filters and flame logs, there were very expensive, compact items that I had been wanting to try for a while: drugs.
The private label PCP was all given out on Monday, and I heard private label crack isn't nearly as good as the national brand crack, so I decided to go for the homeopathic herbal drugs. Also, I'd be able to leave without police dogs biting me.
The past few years, there's been a run on homeopathic drugs. People of dubious medical knowledge were buying these pills like pillows at a Gore stump speech. Real people, too, not just those who name their kids Canola and Moonspeckle. This is probably just a fad (see frozen yogurt and snap bracelets) but perhaps there's a glimmer of medical truth in this 21st century snake oil.
To get FDA approval, every drug needs to go through several years' worth of tests. But it's perfectly legal to just release it as a 'dietary supplement', which is a fancy term for 'eat it'. Half the time, the pills or softgels don't come with any indication of what they're supposed to do; the other half, their purpose is printed with a government-regulated asterisk saying 'nuh-uh.'
I had picked up sample pills of ginkgo biloba, echinacea, kava kava, ginseng and St. John's wort. Time for a blind experiment. I didn't know what any of them did, and I wasn't going to find out. I'd take them, note anything unusual in my health or aura color, and if anything happened, it would have to be the pills. If I found out the supposed result, the placebo effect could kick in and I'd throw the results. So I'd take them unknowingly, and if one of them was supposed to remove fingernails or relieve menstrual cramps, then so be it. I'd take all of them, in their prescribed doses, and see what happened. Would my life spruce up, would my chakras realign for a more harmonious balance, would I buy into this crap?
I'll tell you what happened. Two days after I started them, I got the flu. The turn-your-body-to-an-oven, perpetually-shivering, mucus-by-the-bucket flu. I never get the flu. My immune system is a German engineered brick wall. I get maybe half a sniffle a year, tops. But just 48 hours after these grass clippings went into my system, snot on tap came out.
I don't know if this was a direct result of the pills or not. Two days of pretend medicine couldn't do anything good or bad. I only took a pill or two a day of each; that much anthrax wouldn't be able to give me a dizzy spell. But mad scientist that I am, I kept on popping the pills.
I probably should have taken some sick days at work, but there's something very unsatisfying to take sick days to actually be sick. I hacked my way through several days of what might have been a fever if I had a thermometer to check. Since I never get sick, there was no use in me having one. Ditto any sort of cold medicine, except the herbal pills. I probably should have grabbed real medicine at that trade show, stuff recommended by medical doctors instead of doctors of divinity.
Other than the Play-Doh Phlegm Factory, the pills seemed to do nothing. Every morning that I remembered, I gathered my handful of pills at breakfast and took them with a sip of juice, and to no effect. I wasn't feeling more alive or more peppy, my spoons weren't bending any faster under my mental powers, and the ones I threw out the window weren't turning into beanstalks.
Some of the pills came in softgel form, which under no circumstances should you chew. They're soft and feel like gummi, but trust me, once bitten, twice shy. Imagine used motor oil, melted plastic and baker's chocolate in a pill. There's a reasons this isn't a syrup.
After a few weeks, the St. John's wort ran out. Then the ginkgo biloba and kava kava, the echinacea. At this time I pretty much forgot to take the pills, since it was down to just ginseng, and flu aside, this stuff didn't do anything noticeable.
Time to remove the blindfold. I went to one of a shockingly large amount of homeopathic web sites, and found out what they all were supposed to do.
St. John's Wort: I ran out of these first. I had a jar of 50, but the directions said to take two capsules three times a day. At proper dosage, I'm through the jar in nine days. I was only taking the pills at breakfast, so I made the better part of a month. Supposed use - depression. Other than the mild discomfort of swallowing something called Worts, I didn't stick my head in a noose any more or less than I normally do.
Ginkgo Biloba: Wasn't this the first guy to discover the Pacific Ocean? Supposed use - increased memory. I got the pills in November, took them in December and January, and forgot to write this up until July. You tell me if it worked.
Echinacea: I think this is a country in Asia, or it was until Upper Tongo or someplace took it over. Supposed use - immune system bolstering. If it would be possible to execute a pill at gunpoint, I would. Blatant disregard for duty here.
Kava Kava: I've also seen this one as plain old kava, which must be half strength. Supposed use - stress relief. For eight months now I've had the stress of remembering what pills did or didn't work; maybe kava kava and gingko biloba cancel each other out and make me stressed with no memory.
Ginseng: I still have a dozen or so of these pills left. Scottie Pippin and Larry King advertise this, and when I want accurate medical advice, I go to the ugliest celebrities I can find. No mention if it was Siberian ginseng or not. Glad to know something grows in Siberia besides the political dissonant population. Supposed use - energy. Since getting the pills, I got a CD player with remote control for Christmas. What a wonderful thing: I can shift three CDs, go between all my preset radio stations, all without leaving my sedentary stupor. All I need is an IV drip and a catheter and I never have to move again. There's your ginseng at work for you.
As I swallow one of my last ginsengs, I feel absolutely no change. Probably because I was skeptical to begin with. I never take sick days because I never feel, the few times I catch something, that it's not bad enough to justify a whole wasted day watching TV judges.
Everyone I know who takes sick days for real illnesses are up in bed with a wastebasket of soggy tissues. But those people sorta enjoy being sick. They've got a psychosomatic impulse to maximize this illness, get some pity and maybe someone'll make them chicken soup. They can't bother with stuff in the office or a test, they're sick! Who can argue with that?
People on the other side of the bedpan want to stay healthy, and would like to strenuously accomplish this. Just sitting there and not contracting anything doesn't satisfy them; they want to pro-actively save their immune systems. So they take garlic pills and saw palmetto, despite FDA labels that it's all flapdoodle. If it works for you, take it. But if it's cheaper to take a Skittle each day instead of twelve buck a jar bottles of ground up roots and twigs, go for the Skittles. I'll get private label Skittles next time I'm at a trade show for you.