Curtis Reeves Facebook ad: “I retired from US Customs eighteen months ago. The first…”

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I retired from US Customs eighteen months ago. The first thing I did when I got home was go through every cabinet in my house with a small magnet. Eleven of the twelve "copper" water bottles I found stuck to it. One of them was the one my wife had been drinking from for four years. My name is Curtis. I worked at the Port of Long Beach for nine years as a CBP officer in Trade Operations. I retired in October 2024. I am writing this on my own and nothing in this post represents the position of CBP or any federal agency. I have a small workshop in my garage and I am sixty pages into a memoir nobody is asking for. I want to tell you what I saw at the port with the copper water bottles. In 2015 we processed maybe three to five thousand "copper" water bottle units a year through Long Beach. They came in from Shenzhen, Ningbo, sometimes Shanghai. They were not flagged. They were a small import category nobody at our office paid attention to. By the time I left in 2024 the volume was over two million units a year through our port alone. Two million. From the same handful of factory zones. Same crate dimensions. Same shipping brokers. Around the spring of 2019 I started running a small magnet on samples during routine inspections. I had read on a forum that copper is not magnetic and I was curious. The first month I tested forty-one bottles. Thirty-eight stuck. That means the bottles were steel with a copper coating sprayed or plated on the outside. Not copper. I logged it in a green notebook I kept in my desk drawer. I logged for five years. Total samples I personally ran: about twelve hundred bottles. About ninety-four percent failed the magnet. You might ask why we did not seize them. Customs cannot seize a product for false labeling unless the actual brand owner, what we call the rights-holder, files a complaint through a process called recordation. The Amazon storefronts selling these bottles are LLCs that change names every quarter. The "brands" on the bottles do not exist as registered American entities. There is nobody to file. CBP cannot proactively enforce a label dispute without a complainant. So the bottles cleared and went to fulfillment warehouses in Riverside and Compton and shipped from there to wellness shoppers across the country. My wife Joanne had been drinking from one of these bottles for four years. I had bought it for her at a wellness store on Atlantic Avenue in 2020 because she had been waking up with stiff hands. Joanne is sixty-one. She taught middle school art for twenty-eight years and her hands had not been the same since she retired in 2019. She drank from the bottle every morning. We added a magnesium supplement at one point. We tried fish oil. She did yoga for three months. Her hands kept getting worse. I never connected it to the bottle. I had no reason to. The day I retired I came home and went through every cabinet in our house with the small magnet I had been using at the port. Eleven of twelve stuck. Joanne's stuck the hardest. I sat at the kitchen table for a long time. Joanne walked in. She said, "What is wrong with you." I told her. She looked at her bottle. She picked it up and looked at the bottom. She said, "Are you telling me I have been drinking out of a steel water bottle for four years." I told her I was. She put the bottle in the recycling. A guy named Mike retired from our office about a year before I did. Mike and I fish together at Belmont Pier most Sundays. I called him that night. Mike's wife Dee had a copper bottle that I had seen on their kitchen counter a few times. I told Mike what I had found. Mike got quiet. He called me back the next morning. He said he had tested Dee's bottle with a refrigerator magnet at six in the morning while she was still asleep. He said Dee's bottle had not stuck. He said Dee had been ordering them from a small Indian brand for almost three years. He said Dee did not have stiff hands. Dee had bought hers from a brand called House of Ayurveda. Mike sent me the link. I did what I always do. I cross-referenced their lab certificate against the SGS database directly. SGS is the same firm that certifies industrial materials for European trade. Their certificate was real. The bottles are hand-hammered in Moradabad, a city in northern India. Same families have been making them for five generations. I bought one for Joanne. I bought one for our daughter Ellie, who is thirty-one and works in software in Seattle. I bought one for myself. Before I gave them to anyone I ran the magnet on all three. Clean drop on all three. Week one Joanne said the water tasted "different. Like the water at the cabin." She and I rented a cabin in Mammoth twice in the early '90s. That was thirty-some years ago. I had not heard her mention it in a decade. I did not have a chemistry explanation for what she said. Week three Joanne stopped sleeping with the heating pad on her hands at night. The heating pad had been on her side of the bed for two years. One night I noticed it was on the floor in her closet. Week six she went to a friend's grandson's birthday party and helped knead the dough for the homemade pizzas. I had not seen her knead dough in three years. Ellie sent me a text on May 14th. I am going to copy it because I have read it about a hundred times. She wrote: "Hey dad. I don't know if you'll believe this but my brain feels different. Like the lights came back on. I'm thirty-one and I keep thinking about that bottle you sent me. Is that crazy? I'm not crazy. Tell mom thanks." I am being careful what I claim here. Joanne also started doing physical therapy in March, two weeks after she switched bottles. She also stopped drinking coffee out of the chipped mug she had been using since the kids were small. She also added a fifteen-minute walk after lunch most days. Ellie also changed her job in April and is now working from home three days a week. I cannot tell you the bottle is the only reason Joanne's hands stopped hurting. I can tell you it is one of the things she changed, and it is the one she kept. What I can also tell you is that real copper does real things. The antimicrobial effect of copper has been documented in peer-reviewed research since 1893. American hospitals still install copper on high-touch surfaces in their ICUs for exactly that reason. The Ayurvedic practice of storing water overnight in a copper vessel — Tamra Jal — has been a daily ritual in northern India for five thousand years and there is studied science behind why it works. Real copper kills bacteria in water that sits in it. Real copper releases small amounts of essential ions. That mechanism is not new and it is not a marketing claim. Steel painted to look like copper cannot do any of that. The bottle I had in my house for four years could not do any of that. The bottle Joanne is drinking from now can. I am not selling anything. I do not work for House of Ayurveda. I am writing this because I watched two million fake bottles a year clear my port and end up in American kitchens, and because mine was one of them, and because Mike's was not, and because the difference was a small Indian brand his wife had been quietly buying from for three years. Hold a small magnet to your copper bottle before tomorrow morning. If it sticks, the bottle is steel. This is the one Mike's wife buys from and the one I switched my family to: https://houseofayurveda.co/products/himalayan-ayurvedic-pure-copper-bottle-hammered

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houseofayurveda.co

I retired from US Customs eighteen months ago. The first thing I did when I got home was go through every cabinet in my house with a small magnet.

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