How did Happy High Herbs Start?
Happy High Herbs was born from an inspiration when Ray Thorpe, the founder and director of Happy High Herbs, realised that herbs can have both noticeable and pleasant effects on the human body. Through research and experimentation, Ray discovered that herbs offer a safer, healthier and more effective alternative to the known recreational and medicinal drugs on the market, both legal and illegal.
After realising the powerful effects healing plants can have, Ray wanted to share the joys of a more herbal life with the public, but soon realised that one is not allowed to make claims about herbs and their healing properties.
In a quest to promote the appreciation and education of natural plants and herbs, Ray started a small market stall at the monthly market in Nimbin, a tiny town in northern New South Wales. From this humble beginning, Happy High Herbs has grown to a large family of 23, shops around Australia, with one now in USA and one in New Caledonia, and continues to strive towards achieving our mission statement:
Promoting the appreciation, education, benefits, culture and freedom for all Natural plants and herbs.
The Happy High Herbs Mission Statement
We promote and sell age-old herbal remedies, powerful health-boosting superfoods, and safe legal alternatives to recreational drugs.
The herbs we promote are happy healing herbs. None of them are harmful or addictive (ie habit-forming), and have no awful side effect, come-downs or hangovers (unlike some popular legal and illegal drugs such as cigarettes, alcohol, Prozac etc).
Our original idea to promote legal herbs as safe alternatives to harmful illegal and legal drugs escalated to a cause when we became aware of the oppression and restrictions forced onto natural herbs and remedies by politicians strongly influenced by profit-driven pharmaceutical corporations. These chemical companies are very big and very powerful. Despite the image they portray, pharmaceutical companies do not have the health of the public at heart, but rather the health of their investors` bank accounts.
Their drugs sent 25,000 Australians into hospital last year, suffering from their adverse effects alone. In America too, over 180,000 people die each year from prescription drugs, and not one death from herbal medicine! Despite these drastic statistics, the safety and efficacy of natural herbal medicine is continually denied in popular media and the medical industry.
Furthermore, many of the Earth’s most potent medicines are rapidly becoming illegal or restricted. Why? The pharmaceutical corporations cannot patent (and therefore profit on) herbs but they can profit enormously on patented chemicals and pills. Their modus operandi is to isolate the principal ingredient of the herb (forgetting that each plant contains a myriad of chemicals that all work together), make a pharmaceutical product from it, and then work to have the safer, more effective, natural herb prohibited.
There are well over 100 comparatively safe herbs that are prohibited, yet these plants are on this planet for our benefit. In fact, the presence of human liver enzymes designed to metabolise specific plant chemicals, as well as the fact that over 700,000 species of plants produce chemicals that specifically target different aspects of the human body, demonstrates that humans and plants have evolved symbiotically over millenia. Our bodies are designed to interact with plant chemicals!