by Alliance for Natural Health
In just under five minutes, he reveals his plan, which would effectively eliminate supplements from the shelves. Action Alert!
We’ve told you before about Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) Dietary Supplement Labeling Act. Recently, he went on National Public Radio’s Science Friday to drum up support for this dishonest bill.
Sen. Durbin’s strategy has been to paint the dietary supplement industry as under-regulated and over-influential, blocking small, reasonable regulatory changes that would protect vulnerable consumers. (This, of course, is patently false, as we’ve proven over and over.) Don’t be deceived by the spin. The proposed changes are neither small nor reasonable.
The NPR interview was important because the senator came out of the shadows to speak on the record. By doing so, he demonstrated his fundamental (or perhaps willful) lack of understanding about the natural health industry, dietary supplements, their regulation, and even his own legislation. He also fully revealed his intentions for nutritional supplements—that they be regulated like drugs!
Here are some of the highlights from the full transcript:
[The bill requires supplement manufacturers to] provide the FDA with…some basic information about…whether there’s any chemical included in the product that might interact with other drugs or cause some difficulty. It’s just basic information.
In his own words, Sen. Durbin is saying that supplement producers would be legally liable for identifying anything about the supplement that “might” interact with a drug or cause some vague and ill-defined additional difficulty. This is not “basic information.” Even drug companies are not required to report how a drug might interact with all other drugs, because they could not do so. How would the supplement producers know about what “might” interact with every single drug? Or cocktail of drugs? No supplement producer could possibly comply with this requirement, and could face jail or bankruptcy for failing to comply. Sen. Durbin knows full well that this would shut down the supplement industry.
To make it more confusing, Durbin’s bill doesn’t actually require what the senator says it does. Perhaps he wanted this provision but dropped it for the time being and then forgot. Whatever the explanation, this seems to be yet another instance of a senator not reading or understanding his own bill.
The bill does require the FDA to create a list of ingredients that could cause drug interactions, AERs, or problems for sensitive populations. This is still nonsense, because the FDA also would not be able to be sure whether an ingredient interacted with a drug, given the numbers of ingredients and drugs. And of course to be complete, a list of interactions would decide whether the interaction was minor or potentially serious and cover not just one ingredient and one drug, but cocktails of ingredients and drugs. Good luck to anyone trying to figure this out.
According to the bill as written, the IOM (U.S. Institute of Medicine) would study the FDA’s list of interactions. Those judged to be risky would require warnings on the labels. That’s right, completely arbitrary determinations resulting in label warnings—which, if the IOM is involved, will probably include warnings on dosages of vitamins. This creates a slippery slope to a restrictive system like the one they have in the European Union, because it starts with an arbitrary determination of risk and mandatory labeling, and goes from there.
Read the full article here: http://www.anh-usa.org/se...
