HerbalEGram: Volume 5, Number 4, April 2008

The American Herbal Products Association (AHPA), the only national trade association in the United States focusing primarily on herbal products, presented its 2008 AHPA Awards in March during its annual member meeting in Anaheim, California, held in conjunction with Natural Products Expo West.¹

Anthony Young, AHPA’s general counsel and partner with the law firm Kleinfeld, Kaplan and Becker, LLP, was selected as the 2008 AHPA Herbal Hero. This award recognizes an individual who has made outstanding contributions to the association’s committees and initiatives. According to an AHPA press release, the organization chose Young for the award due to his exemplary dedication and support of the herbal community and AHPA during his decade-long tenure with the association.

“I was honored to receive the AHPA Herbal Hero Award,” said Young (e-mail, March 28, 2008). “I love to practice law, and representing AHPA and AHPA members in the good work they do makes my practice even more rewarding. The ceremony was humbling because the others who received AHPA awards that morning were such giants of the botanical field.”

Botanical author and photographer Steven Foster was given the 2008 AHPA Herbal Insight Award. This award honors those individuals or non-commercial organizations that AHPA considers as having significantly impacted or furthered knowledge and understanding of botanicals and their uses. According to AHPA, Foster’s many images, books, and articles have enhanced public knowledge and acceptance of herbs by skillfully depicting what Foster calls the “human-plant relationship.”

“I was delighted to learn that I would receive the AHPA Herbal Insight Award in 2008,” said Foster, who is also a member of the American Botanical Council’s (ABC) Board of Trustees (e-mail, February 25, 2008). “It is always gratifying to be recognized by your peers for your work.” Foster added that the work he creates as an author and photographer is often presented to an “unseen audience,” meaning that he has no way of knowing who views or reads his photography or publications. The award from AHPA is therefore particularly significant in that it shows “that my work has not only been seen, but also appreciated,” Foster said.

A second 2008 AHPA Herbal Insight Award was posthumously bestowed upon the late Stephen Straus, MD, who served as the first director of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). During Straus’ leadership of NCCAM, from 1999-2006, research at NIH into CAM modalities increased threefold.² AHPA noted that Dr. Straus’ contributions as the first NCCAM director revolutionized the study of herbs at NIH and helped lay the groundwork for current herb research.¹ Dr. Straus died in May of 2007 at age 60, and a tribute article to his life and work was published in HerbalGram issue 75.²

“Stephen Straus of NCCAM had made a profound contribution to bringing NIH funding to herbal clinical research,” said Foster. “He moved the bar up for the recognition of herbs in the research community. To receive the award in the same year is, of course, an honor.”

The company Herb Pharm was recognized with the 2008 AHPA Industry Leader Award, which is presented to a company that has set an example of outstanding business practices.¹ According to an AHPA press release, Herb Pharm Co-founders Sara Katz and Ed Smith have built a company renowned for its positive reputation for quality, rigorous standards, and authenticity.

“While it’s always great to get positive recognition for our years of hard work, it’s especially rewarding to receive that recognition from our many friends and colleagues in the herbal products industry,” said Smith, who is a member of the ABC Advisory Board (e-mail, March 3, 2008). “Our corporate practices are definitely not ‘corporate’—at least not in the usual MBA sense of that phrase. From Herb Pharm’s idealistic hippy beginnings in our kitchen 29 years ago to its present position as the nation’s top-selling provider of liquid herbal extracts, our business skills have evolved but our ideals have never changed—always do the right thing and never sacrifice your integrity for profit.”

“For the third year, we have been honored to recognize top-notch representatives of the herbal industry with AHPA Awards,” said AHPA president Michael McGuffin in an AHPA press release.¹ “This is a very impressive slate of winners, and AHPA is pleased to know we will have an impressive slate of award recipients next year as well. Our awards thus far have only begun to honor the outstanding members of the herbal world.”

—Courtney Cavaliere

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