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!

[TrueBeliever9]

Ask the Moderator if you can add "Hillary Clinton Health Care Plan to your header so more FReepers will read this thread. This is really important.

[Know your rights]

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.

Wrong. "The right to take vitamins" is merely convenient shorthand for "the right to take any vitamins that are your rightful property, and to seek ownership of vitamins through voluntary transactions with their current owners."

[Dead Corpse]

Careful now... according to discostu, that thar is "silly" talk.

Now that taxes here in Central Texas are as high as they are, and going higher, my wife and I are "voting with our feet" and moving back to Minnesota. Not the only reason, but damn... who'da thunk it that TEXAS would be more socialized the MINNESOTA?

[tpaine]

bumpkin

[hobbes1]

Except for the fact that this P!$$es me off royally, it is of course, a small measure of smug satisfaction watching the outrage from those that had previously condemned the use of athletic supplements.....


How many times does the Slippery Slope need to be explained, Before people stop slipping on it....


Oh, Prohormones are Just like steroids...(as If...), and they aren't natural anyway....


oh, oh, well, Ephedra may be natural, but it kills too many people (?!?!?), I mean they call it legal speed...rmfe...


And now Ask not for whom the bell tolls....

[Know your rights]

"Your argument, if taken to its logical conclusion would preclude [...] the right to bear arms, lest government be compelled to provide you a weapon."

Madison wanted the 2nd ammendment to include distribution and training.

Irrelevant, since he lost that argument. Stick to the point: should we oppose the right to bear arms on the grounds that it will lead to government being compelled to provide you a weapon?

[freeeee]

who'da thunk it that TEXAS would be more socialized the MINNESOTA?

Now that's surreal! "Et tu, Texas?" Good luck with your move.

[Dead Corpse]

People drown in water all the time. Ban Di-hydro oxiginates!!!

[Dead Corpse]

I know. Pawlenty has been roasting the DFL'ers up north from what I hear from the inlaws and the outlaws.

Prime reason we are moving is raising the little one around the rest of the family. Spouse is kinda lonely and needs her kin folk.

Prolly isn't gonna happen until later this year though...

[hobbes1]

LMAO!

[freeeee]

Pawlenty has been roasting the DFL'ers up north from what I hear from the inlaws and the outlaws.

I'm not familiar with this, could you explain?

[tpaine]

big bumpkin

[television is just wrong]

No action on this bill since 4/03

[Dead Corpse]

He's cut taxes. Signed the CCW law. Changed some of the corporate legal morass around to make it easier for businesses to run. Things are really swinging back around. Almost all of the major DFL (Democrat Farm Labor) types are either old or living in the Metro area. Outlying areas are getting to a point where they are swinging the State votes back to the conservative side.

In todays political makeup, Ronnie would have won MN instead of Mondale. At least that is the perception I've been getting from the family and from from the Net.

[Libertina]

May the good Lord save us from "safety." From Federal all the way down to city government...

[tpaine]

freeeee wrote:
If others can dictate the smallest details of my life, perhaps you can explain our country's claim to liberty?

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.

Not true, dicostu. -- NO level of our governments have ever been delegated the power to flat out 'ban'. -- In fact the 14th was passed to stop just such infringements of our rights to life, liberty, or property back in 1868. Government can 'reasonably regulate' the public sale & use of property like vitamins, under the "rule of law"; - Constitutional law.

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,

You talk about "silly"? What's 'reasonable' about banning health concoctions?

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.

Dry counties regulate the public sale or consumption of booze. You have the right to drink all you can get, in private.

The mass production of rights disempowers state and local governments, thus killing states rights.

States have no rights, only powers, and those powers are limited, as per Art. VI, & the 10th/14th Amendments, just for starters.

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.

Good idea, as long as states follow the basic principles of individual freedom, as per our US Constitution.

[discostu]

Since you need food to be alive food in the general category is an OK right. But you don't have a right to filet mignon.

[discostu]

Since it's explicity in the Bill of Rights, not something we could claim to be an unenumerated right, the question has no bearing.

[Know your rights]

you don't have a right to filet mignon.

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.

[Dead Corpse]

The Fed Gov is not given the power to regulate filet mignon. Would you support a Federal Ban on filet mignon?

Of course not. Neither should they be trying to pass a stupid law.