Crossing The Hurdles On The Way To Success

It was all natural, all legal and that was one of the reasons why you know, at the end of the day the government was so frustrated with me. I mean the President took actions against me at the time. He put a head of the FDA at the time, it was a guy named David Kessler, who went on national TV. He refused to be on TV with me in the same room. So we had to do a satellite broadcast on Sam Donaldson’s show – Nightline.

Great reporter Sam Donaldson, who ironically also covered Iran contra but Sam Donaldson came to my office and I did the interview with Sam and David Kessler did the interview by satellite in some other office and he was really I mean you know the directive was to take me down, but the government didn’t understand because they were like, well if it’s drugs, we’ll get the DEA on them and they called the DA and the DEA investigate and they’re like it’s not drugs. They’re like, well, then we’ll get the FDA on him and the FDA was like, yeah, it’s a supplement sort of. It’s not a vitamin, it’s not not a vitamin. They didn’t know what to do. I didn’t fit into any mold.

We had created an entire new niche, not only that we were selling in the most unconventional of places. Sure we got into GNC and 7-11 and I was in 30,000 doors by the time I was 18 years old. 30,000 stores were selling our stuff not including the franchises that each had five ten thousand stores, those kinds of things. But we were also selling through unconventional places. We were selling through adult stores. Larry Flint called me to his office many times. He was selling us at his Hustler stores.

We were sold in all the places that sold Playboy and Hustler and Penthouse, all those places not only that, we were sold in record stores, when the CD business started go down because of Napster and Ipods coming out and all that stuff. These stores were dying, tower records was dying and we kept them afloat. People were coming into the store to buy herbal ecstasy. We were keeping the new age bookstores afloat. They were all selling herbal ecstasy. Everybody was selling herbal ecstasy. All the stores on Melrose had ashbury, you know. We had I had my own stores that we franchised, so you would see these neon ecstasy signs all over the place. We had a flagship store on Melrose. That was a store that just sold legal psychedelics and legal drugs and books on psychedelics and we had lectures and it was an insane time.