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!

[OXENinFLA]

SOaB!!!!

[Fiddlstix]

Bump

[hobbes1]

When they came for the Prohormones, I wasn't a juicehead so I didnt speak out.Then they came for the Ephedra and the norepinephrine, but i wasn't fat or tired, so I didn't speak out.When they came for the Vitamins.....

[freeeee]

I'm paying attention to recent history.

Yours is a wholesale surrender to socialism. Rather than fight the assertion that people are owed entitlements (perish the thought, now that Republicans are too buying votes), you would foresake the concept of rights altogether.

As conservatives, our core values are :

As a free people we reserve a nearly infinite set of non-enumerated rights. And no one owes you help in exercising a single one of those rights.

Rights + responsibility. Are these not conservative values?

[discostu]

Yeah the objective parameter is that rights shouldn't include silly things. You don't have a right to wear paisleys, you don't have a right to pick your nose, you don't have a right to see he Jackass movie, you don't have a right to have chocolate cake for breakfast, you don't have a right to be an annoying git. It's just logic man, when you establish something as a right then you're declaring that any interference with your ability to do it is wrong, so then suddenly if the vitamin industry goes TU because nobody wants their stuff this is a terrible thing that's destroying the rights of American.

[hobbes1]

HOw else do you account for banning Ephedra, in the midst of a National obesity epidemic....?

[discostu]

No, mine is a wholesale aknowledgement to the dangers of activist courts. I'm fighting the assertion that any damn thing you can think of is a right.

As you said "nearly infinite" that means not everything is a right, taking vitamins is on that list.

[freeeee]

"Silly things" is a subjective term. Care to try again?

You don't have a right to wear paisleys, you don't have a right to pick your nose, you don't have a right to see he Jackass movie, you don't have a right to have chocolate cake for breakfast, you don't have a right to be an annoying git.

If others can dictate the smallest details of my life, perhaps you can explain our country's claim to liberty? How does your version differ from that of oppressive countries?

[dljordan]

You should look at what's happened in the EU. No vitamins without a Dr's perscription.

[freeeee]

As you said "nearly infinite" that means not everything is a right

Because non-enumerated rights do not include actions that infringe upon the rights of others (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), they are said to be nearly infinite.

[Know your rights]

Your post doesn't respond to this point: "Your argument, if taken to its logical conclusion would preclude [...] the right to bear arms, lest government be compelled to provide you a weapon."

[Know your rights]

Life liberty persuit of happiness

Liberty includes the liberty to tak vitamins.

[discostu]

The difference is in thinking that just because the fed isn't allowed to regulate it that means no one is. Back in the old days the 10th Ammendment was respected and states and cities could ban stuff the fed couldn't. That was when we understood that not everything a person wanted to do was a right. Now we try to stop the fed from doings stuff in a way that will also stop the states and cities. What's wrong with a city deciding it's a vitamin free zone, we've still got dry counties in this country and the reason we do is that we've never taken the silly step of declaring there to be a right to drink alcohol. The mass production of rights disempowers state and local governments, thus killing states rights. The liberty is in letting states and lower levels of government decide things for themselves instead of forcing them to allow every single made up psuedo-right just so we could keep the fed from writing a bad law.

[freeeee]

Your post doesn't respond to this point: "Your argument, if taken to its logical conclusion would preclude [...] the right to bear arms, lest government be compelled to provide you a weapon."

Here's another:

It would also preclude freedom of religion, lest government be compelled to provide you a God.

[discostu]

Check your federalist papers. Madison wanted the 2nd ammendment to include distribution and training. IMHO it would have been cool if he'd won that argument (even though Jefferson's objections were correct, a tyranical government just would have distributed substandard weapons and poor training) just because it would kill all the stupid 2A arguments the liberals have today.

Then of course there's JFK citizenship marksmanship program (which was eventually killed by Clinton) that actually did just what Madison wanted but for a nominal fee (I think it was $100, for which you got an M1 and 8 hours of training).

[cyborg]

LOL

[Know your rights]

The storehouse of rights is in our own ability to use our minds. A right to use vitamins is inherrently moronic

Is a right to eat food "inherently moronic"?

[TrueBeliever9]

I am hopeful that this thread will get bumped BIG TIME!

I copied it and sent it to everyone on my personal email list.

[freeeee]

Your point is well taken.

Though I am a libertarian I am not unwilling to compromise. In exchange for limits on the federal government I would accept state's powers to regulate such as you suggested.

In that way, Americans could vote with their feet to a state or locality most agreeable to their way of life. You could go somewhere that vitamins are regulated, I could go someplace they are not. The "laboratories of democracy" would be the judge of our actions.

Come to think of it, that's precisely how our country was set up. Too bad we've become 'smarter' than that!

[Dead Corpse]

Irony...