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Amanda Brown is the owner of Tucson Herb Store on Fourth Avenue, which opened in January of 2003. She helps customers find herbs to fit their individual needs and believes that herbal remedies have strong healing powers.

"In this day and age, medicine is thought of as something you would get in a prescription from a doctor, something a pharmacist makes. But [it's] pretty recent, in the last 100 years, that herbal things are an alternative, whereas for thousands and thousands of years, it was just medicine. For me, this is still just medicine.

[Herbs] can definitely be good for your health, and I think they help to connect us back to the Earth and the world we live in. I feel like when people come in here and they smell things and see the plants, they feel calm, because that reminds them of where they're from. To me, that's herbs' biggest helping quality. They just have so much to help in the way of reconnecting us to our roots.

I'm not completely opposed to pharmaceuticals. It's just another form of help that's good, but I think people overuse it for sure. I think Western medicine has its place, and it is a valuable thing that we have antibiotics if you have a horrible infection. But in a lot of cases people are just willing to give too much of their power over to doctors and pharmaceuticals just to take the problem away.

I would say probably 90 percent of the time I would pick herbs over pharmaceuticals. I think that especially in America, [people] have discredited herbs and their healing capabilities. Every day I have someone come in [to my shop] and say, "Does this work?" and it's a weird question, because why would I be here if they didn't?

One thing I hear a lot is people feeling depleted and run down, and they're tired of their pharmaceuticals. They're taking all these drugs and they're tired of it and they want some kind of alternative. I just feel happy that they have found a connection to the plant and I can be there to facilitate that."