Your Right to Use Vitamins Is in Jeopardy, Senators Push Regulatory Assault on Vitamins

HUMAN EVENTS ^ | 09.03.03 | Dr. Julian Whitaker

[Coleus]

Your Right to Use Nutritional Supplements Is in Jeopardy

Senators Push Regulatory Assault on Vitamins

by Dr. Julian Whitaker

Posted Sep 3, 2003

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We need to take action, and we need to take action now. There is a movement in Congress to push through legislation that would restrict your freedom to use nutritional supplements, and could destroy the nutritional supplement industry?and, in the process, endanger your health.

Here is the problem. Reacting to the hysteria over ephedra, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D.-Ill.) has introduced S. 722, cosponsored by colleagues Hillary Clinton (D.-N.Y.), Dianne Feinstein (D.-Calif.), and Charles Schumer (D.-N.Y.). The bill gives unprecedented power to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove nutritional supplements from the market. Here’s how:

• It calls for a reporting system for adverse reactions to nutritional supplements.
  
  
• It empowers the FDA to act on a single adverse reaction report and immediately take the product off the market while it is being investigated.
  
  
• In addition, the FDA could force the manufacturer to undergo prohibitively costly safety analyses of the product, similar to what is required for new drugs.
  
  Here’s a possible scenario. Mrs. Jones in Somewhere, USA, is taking a supplement containing vitamin C. One afternoon she has some diarrhea. She faints, falls in her bathroom, hits her head, and is hospitalized with a head injury.
  
  Believe it or not, an adverse reaction could be pinned on vitamin C. Based upon this single event, the FDA could at its discretion move to restrict sales of vitamin C throughout the entire country until an investigation proves that vitamin C did not cause Mrs. Jones’s problems.
  
  Smokescreen of ‘Safety’
  
  The bill also gives the FDA license to require supplement manufacturers to submit safety information that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, patterned on regulations required for new drugs.
  
  This is absurd. New drugs need rigorous safety testing because they are compounds that have never been ingested by human beings. The ubiquitous use and long history of safety of nutritional supplements are apparently irrelevant to the sponsors of this bill.
  
  The nutritional supplement industry arguably has the best product safety record of any industry in the country. According to Rep. Dan Burton (R.-Ind.), a maximum of 16 deaths were attributed to a nutritional supplement last year. (Excessive doses of ephedra were the suspect in the majority of these cases, and the supplement link was definitively proven in only a few of them.)
  
  Meanwhile, the FDA turns a blind eye to the 106,000 deaths from adverse effects of prescription drugs and the tens of thousands of deaths from aspirin and other over-the-counter drugs that occur every year.
  
  This isn’t about safety. It’s about control.
  
  Harmful Bill
  
  This bill is a good example of government irrationality.
  
  According to a 2002 report by Washington, D.C.,-based Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), the use of antioxidants, folic acid, calcium, zinc, and other nutritional supplements could reduce the incidence of neural tube birth defects by 70%, hip fractures by at least 20%, and sick days caused by infectious diseases by 50%?Heart disease, stroke, cataracts, macular degeneration, some types of cancer?nutritional supplements have been shown to prevent or delay all these conditions and others.
  
  Furthermore, CRN reports that by delaying the onset of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and hip fracture alone, nutritional therapies could potentially save $89 billion a year in healthcare costs!
  
  Yet S. 722 would empower the FDA to dismantle the supplement industry and prevent you from receiving the astonishing benefits that only nutritional supplements can deliver.
  
  Immediate Action Needed
  
  The only way to stop this bill is for us to flood our elected representatives and senators with so many e-mails, faxes, and phone calls that they will be forced to say no to this bill.
  
  Grassroots Effectiveness
  
  Don’t underestimate the power of such a grassroots movement. Ten years ago, Health & Healing readers were instrumental in rallying the passing of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). Millions of letters were written to our congressmen and senators in support of this legislation?it generated more letters than any other issue in U.S. history. Because of DSHEA, which reduced the FDA’s power to block the production, sale, and use of natural substances, we have free access to herbs, amino acids, vitamins, minerals, and other nutritional supplements.
  
  An FDA Power Grab
  
  You may have read in the press that we need new laws because there is no regulation of nutritional supplements. This is simply not true. DSHEA gives the FDA tremendous regulatory power, and in fact, it already has the power to pull any supplement it feels is unsafe off the market.
  
  Yet because DSHEA also gives supplement manufacturers some autonomy, the FDA has attempted to circumvent it from day one. This agency fought hard against the passage of DSHEA ten years ago and, in a thinly veiled attempt to get rid of or amend it, has refused to act responsibly within its confines ever since.
  
  Time is of the essence. S. 722 has recently been referred to committee and may be tagged onto the Agriculture Appropriations Bill. We can and must act quickly to stop this legislation.
  
  Send a message to your senators today asking them to vote against S. 722. (See box for information.) If you’ve already done so, do it again. Tell your friends about this threat and encourage them to take action as well.
  
  If each one of you could commit to generating just a handful of e-mails, faxes, or phone calls, over a million messages would descend upon Washington. You may not realize how powerful a grassroots campaign like this can be, but our elected officials cannot ignore something of this magnitude.

  Dr. Whitaker is editor of Health and Healing, one of the country's leading health newsletters.

  Herbal Supplements and alternatives are under attack!! Take Action

  Click here to send your message now!

[discostu]

Not entirely true. In general localized bans focus on sale and production but you can ban consumption, though if there's one thing we've learned from the WOD is that bans on consumption don't work too well.

The reason I could see for banning vitamins (again at lower than the fed, it's not their bag) is that you don't know what's in them. While there are legitimate operators in the nutritional supliment industry it is also the last refuge of snake oil salesmen. Selling a product that you claim does X with no actual proof that it does X is potentially fraudulent, of course they all get around that will little warning labels that explain how nothing else you read on the label has ever been substantiated. This is of course why there's frequent cries to regulate the industry.

Other than the fact that it wouldn't work there's nothing stopping the dry counties from banning consumption.

States used to have rights, not anymore though, Ammendment 10 is generally known as the states rights ammendment, that gives them the right to do whatever isn't in the fed's bag and whatever the fed hasn't told them not to.

And given the fact that there are dry counties banning the sale of stuff that's legal on the federal level (like vitamins) follows those basic rights of the Constitution.

[discostu]

I've already given it to you. Look up dry county laws.

[discostu]

And I'm not supporting a federal ban on vitamins. But I'm against it because it's outside the limited powers the Constitution gives the fed, not because there's some right to use them.

There are right reasons and wrong reasons to oppose something. Making up rights to consume specific products is the wrong reason.

[Dan from Michigan]

Bunch of govt thugs at it again.

Wonder how this will affect Creatine

[freeeee]

Since you need food

It's called the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of Needs.

[discostu]

Life is an unalienable right. You need food to live, therefore food, as a general concept, is an unalienable right.

[Know your rights]

I'm still waiting for an explanation of why our inalienable right to liberty doesn't include the liberty to take vitamins or eat filet mignon.

Look up dry county laws.

That proves only that liberties are violated, not that they aren't liberties.

[discostu]

No that proves that, on less than the federal level, you can ban the production and sale of certain products without violating anyone's rights.

[freeeee]

Life is an unalienable right.

So is liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Prohibition of a certain cut of steak, even though consumption of the steak itself violates no rights is a violation of liberty and pursuit of happiness.

I mean no personal offense, but the idea that others have some power to deprive you of everthing that isn't essential to basic survival is the creed of slaves, and stands in direct opposition to the basic concept of liberty. That the majority decides these things for you makes no difference. In that case, you simply have millions of masters instead of one.

And to think Americans are being asked to give up their lives abroad in defense of liberty, only to return home to have literally every aspect of their existance lorded over, even down to what they eat. Could there be any higher hypocrisy?

A few quotes relevent to liberty vs democracy...

"Absolute and arbitrary power over the lives, liberty and property of freemen exists nowhere in a republic, not even in the largest majority."
- Constitution of the State of Kentucky, Section 2

"Democracy and liberty are often thought to be the same thing, but they are not. Democracy means that people ought to be able to vote for public officials in fair elections, and make most political decisions by majority rule. Liberty, on the other hand, means that even in a democracy, individuals have rights that no majority should be able to take away."
- The Bill of Rights, A Brief History

"The French under the old monarchy held it for a maxim that the king could do no wrong. The Americans entertain the same opinion with respect to the majority... If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority."
- Alexis DeToqueville

[discostu]

I'm not talking about absolute power of any kind. I'm just objecting to rendering the word "right" useless by adding any whim of any whiney journalist to the list of rights.

[Know your rights]

on less than the federal level, you can ban the production and sale of certain products

Of course you *can*.

without violating anyone's rights.

You still haven't shown this, but merely claimed it.

[discostu]

Well I tell you what, move to a dry county in Kansas and start acourt case and we'll see. Since these things have stood for a long time (even before prohibition) and nobody has managed to get them thrown out as a violation of their rights then I'm standing by them not being a violation of any right. Since you can't prove a negative that's gonna have to do.

[Know your rights]

I'm just objecting to rendering the word "right" useless by adding any whim

The right to indulge a whim (that violates nobody's rights) is just as much a right as the right to free speech.

[discostu]

It's just as much a silly right that that isn't actually a right as the right to eat vitamins.

[Know your rights]

start acourt case

You think courts define our rights? I guess there's a right to abortion, then.

[discostu]

No, but that's all you got. The courts can be wrong, but right now they're erring on the side of wide open so you should have a good chance.

[freeeee]

I'm not talking about absolute power of any kind.

I have no right to take vitamins.
I have no right to privacy.
I have no right to wear paisleys.
I have no right to pick my nose.
I have no right to see the Jackass movie.
I have no right to have chocolate cake for breakfast.
I have no right to be annoying.
I have no right to purchase and consume filet mignon.

All of this because the majority, in their pompous royalty, simply felt like throwing their weight around.

But I do have the right to eat food, simply becuse if I don't I'll die (and dead people don't obey orders or pay taxes). Presumably if a way was found to stay alive and not eat, that could be prohibited too.

And yet I'm supposed to believe this is freedom, even worthy of sacrificing my life for? That's funny. I wouldn't give a used hanky for a country that held such contempt for my freedom.

[discostu]

Yawn. Just because you don't have a right to do it doesn't mean it should be banned from you. It just means it's not a right, it's just there as something you do. Don't take things to ridiculous extremes, this is still a country worth dieing for, and a lack of goofball rights that have never been there, not even in the original drafts of the Constitution, doesn't change that. All it means is you've gathered up a bunch of things to whine about, which is entirely your problem, not mine and certainly not something the government needs to correct.

[RightWhale]

Is there anything we're actually allowed to do anymore?

[freeeee]

It just means it's not a right, it's just there as something you do.

If it's not a right, its a priviledge.

Don't take things to ridiculous extremes

Either we are free, or we are not. There isn't much middle ground.

this is still a country worth dieing for

That has to be earned, and the price is liberty. Laws such as this vitamin ban have the opposite effect. I can get such treatment in any number of other countries, none of which I would defend.