MARC ST-ONGE Part 1 of 1: The Mudman

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1:42It was called Black Oxygen Organics. We've got over 15 boxes of this stuff. This right here is what health looks like. I've never slept so good. I feel like I have the ability to handle the stress as a mom. Black Oxygen Organics, the full of humic acid on pregnancy, breastfeeding, and then children. Black Oxygen Organics, or BOO for short, was promoted as the missing link to optimal health. Now, if you spend really any amount of time looking up supplements on the internet, you'll find endless products touting long lists of health benefits. In short, the market is saturated. And yet black oxygen organics rose above the noise.

2:26People were drinking it, slathering it all over their bodies, bathing their children in it, even giving it to their pets. There were people claiming that it cured them from long COVID symptoms, rid them of brain fog, gave them endless amounts of energy. I got introduced to this product through my husband. He took it and it totally transformed him within 24 hours. He lost all of his COVID-19 side effects. In August of 2021, it finally made its way to Joe Rogan's podcast. His guest, Phil Demers, a marine mammal trainer turned activist, mentions that he'd been taking it as an anti-inflammatory. In every which way that I fucking drink this stuff twice a day, just a little bit, this powder, it just blasts me off.

3:08I've never felt anything like it. So I'm not attributing. I'm not. Hold on. What is it? It's mud. Mud. You're drinking mud. Yes. I put mud into a drink. I stir whatever drink I take. What's it called? It's called black oxygen. That's right. This miracle product from black oxygen organics was dirt or dirt that you added to water to make mud. It sold for one hundred and a packet, about four and a half ounces. The homepage on their website called it, quote, the most powerful electrolyte in existence. And the man behind it all was Canadian entrepreneur Mark St. Ange, but he called himself the mud man.

3:50Mark said he started Black Oxygen Organics to help people be healthier and happier. Instead, things went very, very wrong. So this isn't something that just was like marginally unsafe. This is something that was unsafe on a scale that is dangerous and caused the FDA to issue a very, very rare urgent safety alert to say, stop taking the product, destroy it if you have it. It's like that is something that it really just doesn't happen. The big question I have is what exactly was in this mud and where did it come from? And how did Mark convince thousands of people to pay him$110 a pop for just a little bit of dirt?

4:40You are listening to The Opportunist. This is Mark St. Ange, the mudman, a story told in one episode. I'm Hannah Smith.

5:00In 2019, Louise Harris was in a desperate situation. It's a situation that I think a lot of people can relate to. Her son, Nathan, was sick with a mysterious illness. Louise is a single mom in the UK, and she watched as her son developed a series of bizarre and concerning symptoms, both physical and mental. His eyes were always really squinty and dark underneath, and he struggled with anger and irritability and lots of things. He had like these little, like, I called them horns on his head. He had these lumps on his head and always had headaches. Nathan was seven years old at the time, and according to Louise, these symptoms came out of nowhere.

5:40And so she took Nathan to a series of doctors over the course of months. So, you know, we went through our medical system here in the UK and we had stool tests and other tests. And then I had an MRI scan for him to check on his head because at one point we did wonder if he had a brain tumor. Fortunately, Nathan did not have a brain tumor, but he was diagnosed with multiple neurodevelopment disorders. And he was diagnosed with severe dyslexia, severe dyspraxia. They said he had ADHD. They said he had pathological demand avoidance. You name it, he had every label under the sun. So I walked away with a lot of labels and that was it really.

6:20And I just kind of felt a bit helpless. Helpless. That is a familiar feeling, probably, to anyone who has struggled with an unknown illness and searched for answers that were not easy to come by. And although at that point Nathan had received multiple diagnoses, Louise felt like she wasn't actually offered any solutions, anything that might help her son. And so she did what many have done before her. She started to look for answers, for solutions outside of doctor's offices. She went online and she started to look into alternative medicine or natural medicine, as she calls it. At one point, she suspected Nathan's gut was the issue.

6:58She made sweeping changes to his diet, including eliminating sugar completely. And then she also got his hair tested for heavy metals. And found out that he had mercury and arsenic poisoning. And then to cut a long story short, when we started getting rid of the heavy metals out of his body and balancing his minerals and helping his gut, he truly like came alive and was a completely different person. Okay, before we get any deeper into the story, I want to stop and acknowledge something. I was hesitant to do this story at all because the alternative health space is a tricky world to talk about.

7:34It's often triggering and polarizing for people. So I'll just say I am not here to prove Louise right or wrong in her approach to helping her child. Instead, what I can tell you is that Louise is an intelligent person who believes in science and is well-meaning. In fact, her motivation for going down this path is an honorable one, the desire to help her child live a better life. And yet, even with all of this, she still found herself in a position where she was selling actual mud to people. And she was drinking it too.

8:15Louise first heard about Black Oxygen Organics on Facebook in early 2021. A lot of people were talking about fulvic acid and the benefits of that. I was seeing a few people post some stuff about fulvic acid. And I did know that there were benefits to fulvic acid. The main selling point for Boo was its high concentration of fulvic acid. Fulvic acid. It's actually naturally occurring in soil and decomposing matter. Farmers have long been adding it to fertilizer. But it's become more recently popular because of its use in skincare products. A 2019 study showed that fulvic acid has anti-inflammatory properties that are beneficial for the skin.

9:00And Louise had heard about this fulvic acid craze. and so she bought some black oxygen and tried it. One of my friends had a really bad candida rash and it really helped with that. Other people had issues with sleep. It really helped us sleep. But I did feel good energy with it when I was taking it. The list of potential health benefits for drinking this mud is so extensive. There were claims of it helping people sleep, but also giving them an energy boost before a workout. There are claims of it increasing heart health, blood pressure, brain function, happiness levels. Customer testimonials were flooding Facebook.

9:40But there were also videos from Mark St. Ange himself explaining how to use the products and what to expect. So you become immune to your environment. So what it does, it actually increases your immune system. And you gotta drink this within the hour to get that energy boost. Mark told his origin story about how he first fell in love with mud. It goes like this. I started as an orthotherapist 30 years ago. So my passion was always inflammation. From what we were able to find, Mark was only ever certified in massage therapy, not orthopedic therapy. But anyway, he says in 1987, he discovered the power of mud and it changed his life.

10:26And one year we went to Germany and we stumbled upon this black mud. And the people there were using it to treat inflammation and pain. So I decided to bring it back into Canada and started using it in my patients. And I was raised in northern Ontario. And for those of you who know that, there's a lot of bogs out there. And this particular mud, this particular product comes from bogs, or a better slang word would be a swamp. Mark goes on to say that he realized that he may be able to source the same therapeutic mud full of fulvic acid right there in Canada. And so he goes out and he looks for it.

11:07So I researched 63 bogs from northern Ontario to Rivière-de-Jaloux in Quebec. And I stumbled upon this one here in Moose Creek, Ontario. And it has the highest level of this very unique ingredient that we're all talking about called fulvic acid. Mark claimed that he had discovered a way to remove the fulvic acid from the mud that he had collected from this particular wonderful bog, and the result was a rich natural healing resource. Pretty quickly after she tried the product, Louise became a brand partner. That's right. Black Oxygen Organics had a network marketing model, more commonly known as multi-level marketing, or MLM.

11:50To become a brand partner with Boo, you had to buy one of their starter packs. which range from around$600 to just over$1 ,800. Louise already had a large network of people in the alternative health space, and she brought on a few friends who also had large networks of people, and very quickly they were selling this mud like hotcakes. Louise told me that she was making a profit pretty much immediately, which, to be clear, is unusual for an MLM. Usually only about 1 % of sellers actually make money. But Louise was in that 1%. And then it just spiraled. You know, it got big really, really quick.

12:32Within, what, eight months, maybe between eight and 10 months, maybe. You know, it was going up to like, you know, from 200 ,000, 500 ,000, a million, two million a month, you know, and it just was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Hundreds of thousands of people were joining Boo Facebook groups and then buying the product. One woman wrote that she made$21 ,000 in bonuses in her first five weeks of selling Black Oxygen. Because Louise was a top seller for Black Oxygen, she was often on video calls with Mark St. And his business partner, Carlo Garibaldi. She said in the beginning, they were nice and helpful.

13:10But that is when everything was going well. A few months in, Louise started to get complaints from her customers. There were complaints of strange stomach pains and fatigue. One woman said her hair was falling out. Customers were not only having bad reactions, she was also hearing reports that the product was inconsistent from package to package. Louise brought all of this up to the founder and CEO of Black Oxygen, Mark St. Ange, and it did not go over well. I said people are reporting having reactions, and they also don't believe it's the same product that they've received in the past. So he said to me, basically, during this meeting that we had, he goes, well, we've had no one with reactions.

13:53I said, that's not true, Mark. I've emailed you recently in the last month with, you know, a certain amount of people that are claiming to have reactions and you're not taking it seriously. And he was like, yeah, because you'll say you're blaming the product on the reactions. He goes, no one's died. I was like, wow, is this really how you deal with this?

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16:34Louise suggested that Black Oxygen obtain an updated Certificate of Analysis, or COA, which would entail sending product samples to a lab to be tested. She said at minimum, the company should know what was in the product that they were selling and they should know if it was safe to consume. You know, when are we going to get a more up to date certificate of analysis? And he was just like, I'm not paying, I'm not paying$10 ,000 to get another one done. It's the same, it's the same raw product. Like, I'm not, I'm not going to do that. And at that point, I was just like, you know, you're a company that's growing.

17:10If people are asking for it, you just do what is needed. Mark didn't want to pay to have the product tested, or at least that was the excuse he gave. Meanwhile, his claims about the health benefits of black oxygen continued to expand. And at one point, it almost sounds like he's saying it is the fountain of youth. So we're actually reducing the aging process. We can stay younger, longer. And if we push the science in nanotechnology, we can actually stop the aging process. That's in the future. But we can definitely see a change when we start taking it on a regular basis. And the distributors followed suit.

17:52There was a huge focus on how Boo could help with COVID-19. One distributor posted this on Instagram. Quote, David tested positive for COVID-19 in April 2021 and was experiencing lingering side effects. Him and his wife discovered black oxygen and within 24 hours felt like himself. hashtag black oxygen organics. But Louise wouldn't let up about testing the products. And finally, Mark agreed to have a new certificate of analysis done. He told Louise he'd done it. It had come back and the results were fine. The product was safe. But when she asked to see those results, he refused. So they said that they'd done an up to date one, but then they didn't share the results.

18:39So that then got me thinking, well, hang on a minute. You've done one and you're not prepared to share the results. So you can imagine the amount of people then going, but why? Why would they not share it? Finally, Louise thought, if Mark won't test the product, I'll just do it myself. And I found two or three labs that could test various batches. And we sent the product off ourselves to be tested. And when the results came back, there were nothing like what the company was stating the product is.

19:12The tests showed that if people were taking the product in the amount suggested on the packaging, which was 2.5 grams and 16 ounces of water, they were ingesting dangerous levels of arsenic and lead. Louise was horrified. And she shared her findings with Mark and his business partner, Carlo. She expected them to be horrified as well and to take immediate action to warn people. But that's not what happened. Yeah, I just said, like, you need to be, you need to be contacting everyone. and you need to put a comms out and say, look, we've had new COAs done. You know, now the seven size needs to be this and you need to recall all these packs and this is what you need to have put on them.

19:51And so I gave that recommendation. Instead, Mark insisted that Louise's lab results were not reliable. He said the product was safe. He said his whole thing was about helping people. I just think I saw something really different when, you know, we were telling him, you know, the situation of what was actually going on, of how defensive he got. It was like, if that's your true mission, you'd be really curious to understand and not be defensive, you know? Suddenly, Louise had to sit back and wonder if Mark was intentionally misleading people. Was he hiding something? Was anything that he had told her true?

20:31Like, for instance, the warehouse that he said was manufacturing the product. Louise was in the UK. She'd never been to the warehouse, which was in Canada, but she knew the address of it because it was on the packaging. So she got on Google Maps and she found these buildings right next to the warehouse and started calling them. And she finally got a hold of someone who worked right next door to this warehouse. And then he said, oh, that warehouse has been delinquent for years. I was like, sorry. And he was like, I'll drive around there tomorrow if you want and take a picture. So he drove around there and took a picture and it was literally a building that was not used, but boarded up.

21:19If the mud wasn't being packaged at the warehouse, where was it being packaged? Where was it even coming from? Louise was now looking at black oxygen with a totally different lens, a critical one. She wanted answers. And she wasn't the only one. She was about to link up with someone who typically she wouldn't have that much in common with. Someone who had also been researching black oxygen organics. An anti-MLM activist named Kira Manchester. With Boo, it became like really commonplace. The reps were just making really blatant health claims. I mean, lists that have every ailment you can think of.

21:59This magic mud would cure it. And it was just post after post after post, videos, live streams. And I was just like, what is this insanity? Kira started speaking out online against MLMs around 2018. She had a family member join the supplement company Herbal Life, and she watched as this family member spent tons of money and time going deeper and deeper into that pyramid scheme. As a note, Herbal Life ended up paying$200 million in a settlement after the FTC charged them with deceiving their distributors about earning potential. And ever since Kira witnessed her family members suffer at the hands of that MLM, she had passionately tried to expose MLMs and educate people.

22:4599.7 % of people who are in MLMs either make nothing at all or lose money. And it destroys families. It destroys marriages. It destroys friendships. You know, if other family relationships, you know, it bankrupts people. When people come out, they have so much guilt and shame. that, you know, people have PTSD, anxiety, depression, like it's psychologically messing these people up. In the beginning, Kira posted under the pseudonym Mambi, keeping her identity secret for two years. She was afraid of the backlash she would get by speaking out against MLMs. And she did get backlash. But she also built a community and started to post under her real name in 2020.

23:30She now runs multiple pages on Facebook warning people about predatory companies, And she is always on the watch for new MLMs that pop up. And she remembers seeing people post about this mud, about black oxygen organics. And she immediately noticed red flags about the company. We had started joking about it, like they're selling mud, you know, and we didn't take it that seriously. But as it started gaining in popularity, I was like, you know, maybe we should like make a group. And then we were kind of joking about like group names. That's how we came up with Boo is Woo. But it got to the point I was like, you know what, I think I'm going to make it because this is a problem.

24:04because they're not slowing down. They're just getting more and more people. And this is more and more people making these health claims. And they're going to kill somebody at this point because somebody is going to go off their medication. They're, you know, or they already distrust doctors. And now they're going to take dirt, you know, bog mug, and use that instead of the medicine that they should be on. Kira said typically MLMs in the health and wellness space are very careful about making health claims. They're often operating in private Facebook groups, But not Black Oxygen Organics, or Boo.

24:37Boo was right there, out in the open, and Kira was shocked at the health claims that she was seeing posted online. One of the big things with Boo was that reps believed that the dirt was removing parasites from their body. Which is kind of funny thinking that eating dirt is removing parasites when, you know, like dirt could potentially be giving you parasites. Kira began researching the founder and CEO, Mark St. Ange. So one really interesting thing about Mark is that we basically found it impossible to find any reference at all to him before like 1994. And that's kind of around when he started his first MLM company.