"...who, in one fell swoop, cast serious doubt on the practice of field drug testing, expose the lies of commercial soap producers..." [And more!]

Too funny.

Conscious Choice: Dr. Bronner’s Magic Media Soap Opera:

"Another film — this one hitting the small screen...

Entitled Soap, Drugs & Rock and Roll the seven-minute short is an original and effective use of the media as a PR tool — with our heroes the unassuming soap makers who, in one fell swoop, cast serious doubt on the practice of field drug testing, expose the lies of commercial soap producers, advocate for organic products and educate the viewer on yet another layer of our culture’s dependency on oil.

The circumstances laying the grounds for the story have already become the stuff of legend:

On the night of April 4, Don Bolles, eccentric 51-year-old drummer for punk outfit The Germs, was driving through über-conservative Newport Beach, Calif. on his way to an AA meeting when his tricked-out van was pulled over, allegedly for a broken taillight. Bolles gave consent to search the van, and the presiding officer found a bag of legal medical marijuana sitting next to a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap. For some reason (perhaps because the bottle was clearly labeled as hemp soap) the officer decided to apply a NarcoPouch® 928 field test to the soap to assess it for drug content. The test came back positive for GHB, and Bolles was arrested and taken into custody.

Upon hearing this, the Dr. Bronner’s company immediately paid Bolles’ bail and legal fees, and stepped up to defend their brand publicly. David Bronner appeared before California media denouncing the charges as “totally absurd,” and suggesting that Bolles was pulled over for the offense of “driving while weird.” They then ordered the same NarcoPouch® 928 test and began testing their soap products. What they found was astounding

“It was a gift that fell out of the sky,” Bronner says with a measure of incredulity. “We saw a golden opportunity to address greenwashing in our industry head on.”

The “gift” to which Bronner is referring was the discovery that his — and in fact any natural organic soap — will always test positive for GHB using the NarcoPouch® 928 or other similar field drug tests, which makes the false-positive a good indicator of real organic vegetable oil-based “castile” soap. What the Bronners then learned, in another seemingly pre-ordained twist, was that commercial “liquid soap” products made by companies like Dial, Softsoap, Kiss My Face, EO and Nature’s Gate, all tested negative for GHB, indicating that they contained no real soap in the recipe. In voiceover, David Bronner then explains that the “soap” in these products is really a collection of petrochemical detergents.

Thus, the NarcoPouch® 928 is outted as a lousy drug test, but a really great soap test.



“It’s not the most glamorous battle we’re fighting, but it’s our backyard,” adds the tall, quiet and unassuming David Bronner. “Our grandfather was a radical, and we’re just trying to keep pace with the standards he set. He used to quote Hillel: If not now, when ? Well, we have enough strength and visibility to speak to these issues and change them in the long run. We just call things as we see it, and in this case, we saw injustice, and we came in to clean it up (no pun intended).”

“Yeah, you can use our soaps for pretty much everything,” Mike Bronner adds, “except getting high.”"