Mark Blumenthal is the Founder and Executive Director of the American Botanical Council (ABC), an independent, nonprofit research and education organization dedicated to providing education using science-based and traditional information to promote responsible use of herbal medicine and related preparations from beneficial plants and fungi. He is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of HerbalGram, an award-winning international, peer-reviewed quarterly journal, the contents of which reflect the educational goals of ABC. For six years he was an Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin, College of Pharmacy, teaching a course on herbal products in today’s pharmacy. Mark served as Co-Founder and former Vice-President of the Herb Research Foundation (HRF), a nonprofit research organization.
When he was formerly in the herb industry over 25 years ago, he was President of the Herb Trade Association, the former organization that represented the interest of the herb industry in the 1970s and was a founding board member of the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA). He is the senior editor of the English translation of The Complete German Commission E Monographs—Therapeutic Guide to Herbal Medicines, a rational system for evaluating the safety and efficacy of herbal medicines. This publication was ranked second of the medical books published in 1998. Mark is also the senior editor of The ABC Clinical Guide to Herbs, a reference book and former continuing education module, and coauthor of ABC’s forthcoming reference book on solvents used in botanical extracts. He is also the Director of the ABC-AHP-NCNPR Botanical Adulterants Program, an international consortium of industry, analytical laboratories, nonprofit research societies, trade associations et al. that are dedicated to educating industry about the problems associated with accidental and intentional adulteration of botanical raw materials, extracts, and essential oils.
How do you balance the need for innovation with the responsibility of ensuring consumer trust and safety?
This is almost like a no brainer, because consumer trust, consumer safety, and consumer benefit are always the goal, no matter what you’re doing. Innovation needs to take a second seat to that. So in that sense, it’s really not a need to balance, because what you’re doing is always about the consumer. So whatever forms of innovation—whether it’s new ingredients or new ways to make ingredients or new ways to package them or position them—that always takes a second seat behind ultimately, what’s the benefit to the consumer? It is a priorities issue, and the consumer is always the priority. People must be totally committed to true North, and it’s always about public health and the individual’s experience.
If you had unlimited resources, what groundbreaking project or initiative would you pursue in our industry?
We launched HerbTV at the start of March, and it’s really resonating, so I’d put more funding there, because HTV is not just about finding people in the academic community, or health professionals, or our botanical industry stakeholders, but consumers. We have more than 22,000 people signed up already, so hopefully we’re on our way to becoming a major video portal for herbal research and education. But one thing I want to start is a campaign to explain to people about medicinal trees. I don’t think people know enough about the value of trees as medicine. They think usually of herbs like rosemary or thyme, or goldenseal and ginseng; they’re low-growing plants and bushes. But people overlook trees as having medicinal value. They just don’t see them. When you get people to enumerate benefits of trees — they provide shade, or put out oxygen, suck up carbon, help prevent erosion, or produce fruit and nuts. They’re beautiful, and they house wildlife and offer timber for construction. Hardly anyone mentions medicine. But we have ginkgo, and we have horse chestnut, and we have willow bark, and yew and pine and so many other trees of great value. We at ABC are trying to put something together to get people to really realize trees as medicine, in addition to all the other beautiful and valuable things they do.
What’s a lesson you’ve learned from a completely different industry that has helped you in your work?
I come from El Paso, and my grandfather and his uncle had a store in El Paso that was the biggest department store in town—The Popular Dry Goods Company. They started in 1902, and it lasted for 93 years, until 1995. It was the biggest department store between Dallas, Denver and Los Angeles. We had a great reputation for quality goods, but also for excellent service. For example, during the Depression, when the banks closed and people had no access to their cash, my grandfather opened up the store to his customers. If they had a charge account, they could come to the office and borrow $5 cash, each week, and put it on their revolving charge account so they could feed their family for a week. People loved shopping in our store because of the quality of the merchandise and the quality of the service. I believe in the value of ‘The customer is always right,’ no matter what. I learned that from my grandfather, my uncles, and my father. And there’s another thing—we had four generations of families that worked for our family. And I learned that you treat your employees like family. You treat them as well as you possibly can. In my case, they express and materialize the mission and the vision I have for ABC. I’m grateful for the dedicated consistency and commitment of ABC’s employees, four of whom have worked at ABC for 30, 35, and 37 years! We have very little turnover, and we have great institutional memory. And I learned that from my family’s business.
What’s one small but powerful change our industry could make today that would have a lasting impact?
Well, one is people should pay attention to and adopt the Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program (BAPP) SOP for the Disposal or Destruction of Irreparably Defective Articles. That’s a no-brainer, and that’s something that we’re very invested in, so it would be remiss of me not to mention that. But to help prevent that further, I would revisit an idea I offered up when DSHEA was still being crafted. I suggested back then that if somebody wants to market any botanical as a supplement with no health or structure/function claim, they just market it as whatever it is. However, in my view at the time, we should have had a proviso that if somebody’s going to make a structure/function claim, they should be able to certify the authenticity of the identity of what they have in that bottle. Identity should be confirmed and tested by an independent third-party lab. The company should provide some form of assurance that the material is authentic, so the consumer can then say, ‘Okay, if this is really goldenseal, or this is really ginseng, I have a better assurance that this product will give me the benefit claimed on the label or in its marketing.’ Now, that’s not a small thing. It’s huge in some ways, because it takes more time, energy, and cost for businesses. But my thinking is, if you’re going to make a claim for your product, you’ve got to be able to stand behind it, and be able to look that consumer in the eye, and say, ‘I know my product is what I claim it to be and it will do this for you.’ Then we get into what kind of scientific research you’ve done on your product to support your claim(s), which is another conversation. Where’s the research? ABC has paved that ground and has been pushing that agenda for almost 40 years.