For some reason, in the humanities, especially with "pop" stuff like this, you can find a lot of extremely strong claims with basically zero backing.

At any rate it's not a translation issue. You can see in your link, which also has the original Greek, that the phrase used is "pharmaka lugros", which means precisely what the translation said. Maybe there is some other tradition besides Homer that handed it down, but it's healthy to have a lot of skepticism with claims like this.