1 year ago
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Photo Illustrations by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Flickr Commons/TikTokThe Rattlesnake King was, by his own account, a man who wore many hats: cowboy, entrepreneur, and naturopathic healer, to name a few. Today, however, Clark Stanley is best remembered as one thing: being the original snake-oil salesman, a conman who tricked the public into purchasing his liniment for medicinal qualities it did not have.
During a demonstration at a 1893 world’s fair in Chicago, he reportedly slaughtered and boiled a snake, skimming its fat off and selling it as “Stanley's Snake Oil” to a rabid audience. When federal investigators got their hands on the product to analyze, they came to the realization that Stanley’s Snake Oil did not contain any actual snake oil, but rather was made of mostly mineral oil. The Rattlesnake King was fined for falsely advertising his product, in violation of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. He paid a few hundred dollars in today’s money.
Social media is just the latest frontier of a fight that has played out between regulators and grifters ever since the Rattlesnake King’s time. Regulators have devised their fair share of enforcement tools: agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and Food and Drug Administration both have strict guidelines when it comes to promoting a health product. Under FDA guidelines, a drug must be “intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease,” and pass a lengthy approval process validating its safety and efficacy. The makers and sellers of dietary and nutritional supplements cannot make health claims about their products, which are not drugs. In the present day, Stanley wouldn’t be able to say that his snake-oil could cure snake bites unless the FDA approved snake-oil as a drug for this specific use.
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