Too Popular for Their Own Good

Ancient Cyrenian coins from 300 B.C. were often embossed with the image of the silphion plant. That's how much Mediterranean societies valued the plant as both medicine and commodity. But you can't find silphion anymore-collected only from wild sources, it became a casualty of its own success. That's exactly the fate faced by many medicinal plants today.


In recent years, the battles waged by proponents of herbal medicines were aimed at getting remedies accepted by a skeptical public and government. They spent years urging that these products be treated like other medicines in terms of consumer safety and professionalism. Now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has finally permitted more informative labels following a 1994 law, there comes a new threat: Supplies of some of these plants may already be endangered by the industry's quick rise to success.

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