Herbal medicine is actually quite a sophisticated, deep, and powerful discipline. Though in the popular imagination its products are either held up as mysterious silver bullets on the one hand or useless bits of superstitious refuse on the other.
There are complicated historical reasons for this, but part of the blame can go to the nature of the commodity. With its remote center of opaque production, the alienable medium of the commodity can be used to camouflage its nature. Its alienable properties can be transferred and separated from the original process of production, using money as both the cutting and binding agent, severing accountability in the process, at least as long as that accountability can be waved away with good PR.
Because how is one to say that one was cheated if one has gotten something that appears to observers as a useful and vital thing? Especially if those observers are in on the take, and daily activity is too complex and historically volatile for anyone to adopt a strong, agreeable and enforceable standard.
So one may receive a lifeless bag of desiccated plant dust, which at one point may have been part of a vital and healing organism, and which is promoted as such by boosters who may or may not know better. And then this exchange can occur with all sorts of different products.
At this point in evolution, the commodity can be made to appear as an outstretched hand of mutual aid, when really it is the hand that is pushing one downward, so that its master can ascend on one's back and on one's alienable social energy.
