"Magic Dirt," The Great White Hope Of The Natural Selection Crowd

If you're dumb enough to eat dirt....

So you’re telling me there really IS one born every minute??

The social media posts started in May: photos and videos of smiling people, mostly women, drinking Mason jars of black liquid, slathering black paste on their faces and feet, or dipping babies and dogs in tubs of the black water. They tagged the posts #BOO and linked to a website that sold a product called Black Oxygen Organics.

Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. The website of the Canadian company that sold it billed it as “the end product and smallest particle of the decomposition of ancient, organic matter.” 

Put more simply, the product is dirt — four-and-a-half ounces of it, sealed in a sleek black plastic baggie and sold for $110 plus shipping. Visitors to the Black Oxygen Organics website, recently taken offline, were greeted with a pair of white hands cradling cups of dirt like an offering. “A gift from the Ground,” it reads. “Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.” 

This is a story that confirms the theory that “a fool and his money are soon parted”…and how Facebook managed to get in on the action. It’s absurd on its face. And yet….

If someone told you that eating dirt could cure you of a myriad of maladies from cancer to COVID-19, you’re smart enough that you’d laugh them out of the room…right? Unfortunately, many well-meaning and otherwise lucid humanoids can’t say that, and they’ve spent a lot of money on bags of dirt that they believe will cure them of whatever’s ailing them and somehow make their lives better.

“Drink it. Wear it. Bathe in it.”  Eat it. Bake it in brownies. Watch “BOO” become just another multi-level marketing scheme (MLM) that had nothing to do with the product’s effectiveness and everything to do with fleecing the gullible.

Yes, indeed. P.T. Barnum was correct; there really IS a fool born every minute. And they have plenty of disposable income.

More than 99 percent of MLM sellers lose money, according to the Consumer Awareness Institute, an industry watchdog group. But according to social media posts, BOO’s business was booming. In selfies and videos posted to Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, women lather BOO on their faces and soak their feet in sludge-filled pasta pots while, they claim, the money rolls in. 

Black Oxygen Organics’ compensation plan, like most MLMs, is convoluted. According to their company handbook, sellers, called “brand partners,” can earn income in two distinct ways: through retail commissions on bags of BOO they sell, and through recruiting other sellers, from which they earn additional commission and bonuses. The more recruits a seller brings in, the more quickly the seller rises in the ranks — there are 10 titles in the company, from brand partner to director to CEO, with compensation packages growing along the way.

What I find most astonishing about “BOO” is that there are three safe, effective, AND FREE vaccines available to combat COVID-19. Yet, despite this, some folks will go to almost any length and spend ridiculous sums on unproven remedies to avoid getting vaccinated.

Thankfully, the “BOO” phenomenon appears to be on the decline, but the folks who come up with these MLM schemes are the sort of low-lives and moral reprobates who never really go away. Instead, they pack their bags and move on to another scheme.

From May-December 2021, it was “magic dirt.” We can’t know what will be next, only that there will be a “next.” The problem is that people may die if anti-vaxxers sell it as a “cure” for COVID-19 or an “alternative” to the vaccines. Then again, that’s never proved to be a moral hurdle for anti-vaxxers, whose primary concern has long been their self-aggrandizement and the inflation of their bank account. If a few suckers die along the way…well, that’s just a cost of doing business, knowhutimean??

Sadly, even after the FDA and Health Canada got involved, there are still people involved in selling and consuming “BOO.” This despite someone noticing that the peat bog in Ontario where “BOO” is produced shares a border with a landfill. Unsurprisingly, independent testing of “BOO” has shown elevated levels of lead and arsenic. Go figure.

Bags of “BOO” are now required to be labeled as “unfit for human consumption.” But, hey, no government’s going to tell the righteous what to do, eh?

Yeah, that’s the effect lead has on IQ, if you know what I mean.

A quick search on Facebook yielded one “BOO” group with 1100 members. It appears to have been inactive over the past months, which will happen when your product is the subject of a class-action lawsuit and the cockroaches have long since scattered.

It appears MLM and “BOO” made for the perfect, if short-lived, marriage. Multi-level marketing’s sole purpose is to separate fools from their money, and “BOO” was just another vehicle for MLM to work its magic. That anti-vaxxers could get in on the action was just a plus for a community that cares nothing for the health and well-being of people. Instead, they care only about their ignorance and prejudice, something they continue to display in considerable quantity.

At least you don’t have to worry about the government implanting a tracking device in you, eh??

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