American Greed, Inc.
WRITER AND HISTORIAN DAVID T. Courtwright calls them “limbic capitalists”—people or companies that target our limbic system, the part of our brains primarily responsible for emotion, especially as it relates to pleasure, motivation, and survival. Courtwright is author of The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business. “Biological evolution shaped the limbic system, which is indispensable for life and reproduction,” writes Courtwright, in a recent story for Stat, a health-news website. “But cultural evolution and technological change created a trapdoor. The same neural pathways can be exploited—lethally—by entrepreneurs of brain-rewarding products that foster excessive consumption and addictive behavior.”
Amy Herrig and her father, Jerry Shults are, or were, limbic capitalists on two fronts: fake weed and flyfishing lodges. For much of the past decade, the Texas-based pair sold dangerous and widely misunderstood synthetic pot, a “designer drug,” while also operating several high-end flyfishing operations. One could argue which of these two activities might be more addicting, but nobody could argue which is safer and healthier.
In December 2014, I received a forwarded email from then senior editor Geoff Mueller. The email was from Herrig, who, along with Shults, owned reputable operations in Alaska, B.C., Chile, and The Bahamas. They also owned a chain of 14 Gas Pipe head shops in Texas and New Mexico, several of which had been raided six months earlier by DEA agents, resulting in the seizure of many pounds of synthetic cannabinoids, commonly called “K2” or “Spice.” Agents also seized assets they claimed Shults, Herrig, and/or their associates had purchased with illicit drug money, including luxury cars, several homes, more than $16 million in cash, as well as boats and planes from Rapids Camp Lodge, on Bristol Bay’s Naknek River, near King Salmon, Alaska.
Though Shults and Herrig had yet to be charged, Mueller wrote a story about the raid for our Winter 2014 issue, believing, as I did, that our readers might find it newsworthy. Herrig didn’t agree. Her email explained that Mueller’s article was way off-base and out-of-line because he’d missed the real story, which was that Herrig and her father were simply victims of government overreach. “Rather than running a ‘juicy story’ attempting to paint our actions in a negative light, The Drake missed out on a true journalistic opportunity to inform the public of a major issue of civil forfeiture happening in this country,” Herrig wrote. She ended her email: “Perhaps The Drake will want to retract at some point or produce a more accurate follow up so as to be inline with what other, well respected journalists have to say about our situation.”
Here is Amy Herrig’s current “situation”: On October 8, in Dallas, she and her father were each sentenced to three years in federal prison for conspiracy to defraud the United States, after mislabeling millions of dollars in dangerous synthetic cannabinoids sold in their Gas Pipe shops. (Most were labeled “herbal incense.”) After a June 2014 Federal raid and civil forfeiture, the pair
