There are allot of snake root flowers/plants. Like Lobelia, you can find i everywhere in the flower market but practically no one sells the Lobelia Inflata except the most specialist of herbalist green houses. The Only place I have ever found the the more rare herbs is a small family down in Southern Ohio outside a college town up on a mountain side. The owner has a pony tale down to his waste and all his employee girls are covered in tatoos and their green house looks as though it might fall down on your head and they raise/sale many of the very hard to come by herbs as plants and seed. Many places sell the seeds and many of these plants are very hard to grow to a usable stage.

The Virgina Snake Root is suppose to be a common plant in my area, but it loves the woods and it is a low grower and not considered easy to find. Lobelia is common from South to North, but so low/small, only an expert with allot of time could ever find it. The large showy herbs are popular because they are easy to find. Take the Ginseng, many people hunted it for a living and 100 years ago they could find 100# in a good day and they hunted it to near extinction to send to China; today your lucky to find a plant and near impossible to find a woods that the owner would allow you to go find plants. Most property owners anymore just don't want hunters/adventurers traveling through the country side, so most ginseng that is found is found ilegally and the last few in our area were what you would call the local doppers with no real jobs and when they would find genseng they would put it in a micro-wave to quick dry it (destroy it) and then take it to the local fur buyers to see if they could get enough $$$ to buy some beer or dope. Today the fur buyers are gone, no one is in the market; so the genseng and popular herbs are raised in gardens or whats called woods gardens. In the USA few are in the commercial herb growing business, so most of the herbs used in commercial bottles comes from the poorest countries on earth that have the labor to harvest the herbs and Dr. Christopher proved many years ago, that these people could care less about these herbs to be shipped to America, in that they would "fake" the herbs by diluting them with all kinds of weeds with a similar color/smell once turned to a powder.

Even today, the fda has no clue about herbs, they have no test to prove or disprove the ingredients of any herbal product; you must rely on the manufacturer's lable and hope its correct.

There are very, very few problems with the herbs used today; you never hear of anyone getting sick. The fda/ftc waits many years between cases and history has proven it was never the herb, but the person who got ill did so because they had been medically damaged by drug use and the herb played little to no part in their health problem. They have one simple way to make a herb look bad; they take the active ingredient and concentrate it, over dose a rat on it and say,LOOK, the herb is dangerous the mouse died from the over dose.

In general, the herbs used today will cause no more than vomiting if the person can't handle it. The poor mouse/rat is known to not be able to vomit and dies often because of that fact. Rat poison operates on that theory.

MH