Medicine: Upjohn’s Medicine Man

When Florida’s usually placid Seminole Indians get a crazy feeling, they drink an ancient tranquilizing tea brewed by the medicine man. This news finally reached the drug world recently through an ex-G.I. with a yen for tranquilizers. He rushed into the Upjohn Co.’s headquarters in Kalamazoo to extol the Seminole tea virtues, especially its lack of side effects. The man who brewed it for him, he reported, was none other than Josie Billie, or Kachanagofte (Big Tiger), onetime chief Seminole medicine man for 25 years and the only person alive who knows the formula.

Whiffing a good thing, Upjohn sent scouts to the Big Cypress Reservation near Immokalee, found a tranquil oldster (74) who still hunts, fishes and farms all day without tiring. Billie was free to talk commerce, it developed, because he got religion 14 years ago and quit practice to become a Baptist minister. Last month Upjohn flew Billie in a private plane to Kalamazoo, there besought him (with a new hearing aid and a little cash) to demonstrate his lore. He did.

The tea, he revealed, is made of at least twelve different herbs and roots (his secret). The recipe came down to him through his grandfather and father, but is so complex that it took him seven years to learn to brew a proper cup. Dosage for any and all mental ills: one piping hot cup the first day, three daily with meals for the next three days. Upjohn tried it on a white mouse, which is trained to leap onto a wooden block at the sound of a bell to escape an electric shock. After ten minutes the mouse walked sedately at the bell, after 30 minutes simply stayed put.

Last week Billie was home building a new chickee (hut) with a bathroom on Upjohn’s money, and Upjohn was analyzing the tea’s ingredients. It will be months before Upjohn feels able to announce its findings, at least two years before a new product could reach drugstores. Billie’s tea, notes one researcher, contains “gunk” that needs thorough investigation. But Upjohn considers the” project highly worthwhile. Very useful drugs have been found before in unorthodox fashion, e.g., reserpine, the ancient tranquilizer made from India’s Rauwolfia plant, which became an antihypertensive drug. A favorable outcome will make Medicine Man Billie a rich man.