"In 1945, not long after learning his parents had been murdered in Nazi death camps, Emil [Bronner] landed in a Chicago mental asylum, forcibly committed by his sister..."

"... where he was administered electric shock therapy, according to his family. After making an audacious escape, he hitchhiked to California, where he began his lifelong, peripatetic crusade to heal mankind. Bronner would hand out bottles of his product after delivering his idiosyncratic public lectures about humanity’s need to save 'Spaceship Earth,' but he soon realized most people were more interested in his free soap than his spiritual ideology. His remedy? He began printing those philosophic ramblings on the labels, which also explained the 18-in-1 uses for his concentrated liquid Castile soap. (Teeth cleaning! Dishwashing! Dog shampoo!) Though a suggested birth-control use has since been discarded, the Bronners have left much of the label’s 3,000-word verbiage untouched, a decision that reflects the family’s deep reverence for a man whose zany presence is inescapable more than two decades after his death at age 89. The patriarch’s writings and his image are scattered throughout the company’s headquarters in Vista, Calif., about 40 miles north of San Diego. A frighteningly large blowup of his grinning face greets visitors in the lobby. Nearby a papier-mâché figure wearing a leopard-print Speedo is a goofy homage to his predilection for conducting business in skimpy swimming trunks. (Fun fact: For decades, the phone number printed on soap bottles rang through to a collection of red rotary phones that Emil Bronner answered at all hours from his living room recliner.)"

"Dr. Bronner’s, the Soap Company, Dips Into Psychedelics/Under the leadership of the founder’s grandsons, the company has become a big financial backer of efforts to loosen government restrictions on illegal drugs" (NYT). 

Emil Bronner "didn’t do drugs, and he was distrustful of Western medicine, refusing to see a doctor even as he began losing his eyesight in his 60s." But the grandsons are donating millions of the company's money to the drug cause. David Bronner, a grandson executive, extols his own experience with LSD and Ecstasy: "I died five times but it got me out of my dark hole and set me on my path." The founder Emil." And he contends that Emil would approve of their promotion of drugs: "Our grandpa was all about shifting consciousness and opening hearts and minds... He probably would have put LSD in his soaps."

As an ex-law professor, I know all about the manipulation of the intent of the founders.