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the plants themselves
27
Plants as Investments and Moneymakers
Plants are becoming an increasingly profitable investment. Europe, the
United States, Japan, China, Brazil, and Mexico have been swept by a
huge demand for herbs, which has led to an enormous increase in profits.
In China, sales of traditional medicines more than doubled between 1998
and 2003, while India’s booming export trade in medicinal plants rose
almost threefold during the 1990s. In Germany, more than 80 percent of
all physicians regularly use herbal products. In the United States, herbs
and natural supplements were a $12 billion business in 1998, double the
total in 1994. Britain, like everywhere else, is being swept along on the
herb revival boom.
At the same time, pharmaceutical companies were not doing so well
financially, and a lot of companies have swallowed up rivals in a bid to
survive. In 1990, the pharmaceutical market profit was 15 percent; by
1
994 it had fallen to 9 percent. In the West, this drop in revenue has
halted research programs, as the money to fund them simply hasn’t been
available. Consequently, scientists were asked to be more creative! One
idea they have developed is to focus on the older generation and the
problems of aging. With the World Health Organization predicting that
the incidence of cancer will double or triple as the number of older
people increases, this age group would seem a likely target.
Another trend, already apparent in some areas of alternative medicine,
is the move to bypass the doctor and sell more products directly to the
public, either over the counter or through mail order. Pharmaceutical
companies have begun “copying” herbs, and this trend should grow in the
years to come. Several pharmaceutical companies are investigating
methods for standardizing plant-based medicines. In the past, only single-
molecule botanicals could be identified. Without proper identification,
researchers could not prove the safety and efficacy of other plant agents,
because there were batch-to-batch inconsistencies. Previously,
pharmaceutical companies would not submit applications for herbal
medicines because companies could not receive patents for them.
However, recently a pharmaceutical company has developed the first
pharmaceutical versions of multimolecule herbal medicines by
standardizing the active molecules and their interactions. Meanwhile, other
so-called herbal concoctions are now being sold by other pharmaceutical
companies. A qualified herbal practitioner would not see these
developments as herbs and certainly they must be treated as drugs,
licensed as such, and their side effects given due heed.
Cuts have been made to research programs that study single herbs
and try to isolate their “magic bullet” components. For years,
pharmaceutical companies threw away the best bits of the plant while
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