Senate Democrat Trying to Block Access to Nutritional Supplements

                                     photo credit: Clean Wal-Mart via photopin cc

Longtime health freedom foe Dick Durbin, the Illinois senator, is at it again.

The Democrat is apparently trying to slip in an amendment to the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (S. 3187) under the radar that could take away your access to safe vitamins and other nutritional supplements. Organizations such as Citizens for Health and the Alliance for Natural Health USA are sounding the alarm about Durbin's latest effort to unfairly target dietary supplement makers (he tried and failed last year to get similar legislation passed).

The amendment in question, according to the Alliance for Natural Health, contains several onerous provisions including...

among other things, that supplement companies must register their products with the [Food and Drug Administration] within 30 days, or they will be considered "misbranded" and companies will be subject to outrageous financial penalties, possibly even jail time. To avoid this, many companies will simply remove their supplements from the shelves until they are able to comply with the new requirement.

Citizens for Health asks "why give the FDA, an agency that has shown an anti-supplement bias in the past, the power to arbitrarily amass a list of 'potentially dangerous' dietary ingredients, especially when there is already a system in place to ensure the safety of supplements?

These organizations and others are asking every health-conscious consumer to contact your U.S. Senators immediately to vote no on Durban amendment to S. 3187.

Sen. Durbin inspired the nickname "Dick Turban" for his offensive and absurd statement comparing the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Nazi death camps back in 2005.

Update: Good news--the Senate defeated the Durbin amendment by a vote of 77 to 20.

 

Sign Petition to Save Nutritional Supplements

                                       photo credit: Clean Wal-Mart via photopin cc
 
Washington bureaucrats (i.e., the real extremists) at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have yet to withdraw the controversial "draft guidance" that threatens access to dietary supplements.

Citizens for Health is continuing to collect signatures for an online petition opposing the proposed regs even though the official FDA comment period is over. Some 19,000 health-oriented consumers already signed, and the goal is to hit 25,000 signatures by February 25 ("25 by 25") that will be presented to Congress and the FDA.

If you care about health freedom, and have yet to sign the Citizens for Health petition, please do so here.

Update: The goal of 25,000 signatures has been met. Citizens for Health is now shooting for 30,000 signatures by midnight, February 29.

Washington Bureaucrats Coming After Your Health Supplements

[Image Credit: Ragesoss]

Imagine going to your local health food store or supermarket and finding the shelves normally containing your favorite vitamin and nutritional supplements completely bare.

There is still time to sign an online petition opposing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's draconian supplement regulations that threatens access to dietary supplements. It wouldn't hurt to contact your member of Congress too.

As Citizens for Health explains...

[The FDA] is attempting to drastically change existing law by saying that finished product manufacturers must make a submission for every product that contains a [New Dietary Ingredient--NID] or whenever a formula is changed, if an NDI is present. If this guidance is not withdrawn and its misinterpretation of law is backed by the FDA's own policy, review and enforcement powers, it would cause major disruption in the dietary supplement market; force a significant number of products off the shelves; and result in revenue losses of over a billion dollars and the unemployment of over 100,000 Americans. Neither American consumers nor the dietary supplement industry should stand for this unconscionable attempt by the FDA to, via various NDI-related side doors, effectively re-write [the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994], maim the health-food industry and drastically reduce consumer choice.

While supplements by themselves aren't always a complete panacea (and some products are hyped up or lack quality ingredients), FDA bureaucrats who routinely allow toxic pharmaceutical drugs into the marketplace seem hell-bent on getting their hooks into the supplement industry. Supplements can and do form one part of an overall healthy lifestyle.

If Obamacare is not repealed, and rationing and death panels become the norm (as has occurred everywhere where socialized medicine has been tried), health freedom and taking charge of our own health with more natural approaches will become even more important.

As one of the comments on the Citizens for Health website indicates: "No one has the right to tell us what supplements and vitamins we can have. That isn't protecting us, it's restraint of trade and is big pharma's way of growing even more powerful and corrupt."

Have you noticed how the same lapdog "pro choice" mainstream news media that seems to accept virtually every job- and freedom-killing Obama administration initiative at face value also regularly helps to demonize generally safe supplements at the behest of Washington bureaucrats and "Big Pharma"? Along these lines, responding to a recent widely publicized American Medical Association study of questionable methodology that sought to discredit vitamins, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com wrote in part:

Caught yet again, the mainstream media has been exposed pulling off a juvenile, simplistic hoax that attempts to scare people away from good nutrition. To accomplish this hoax, they took a poorly-constructed "scientific" study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine which was itself based on erroneous conclusions...and then blatantly misreported what the study data actually showed.

Feds Threaten Health Freedom With New Vitamin Regulations

More absurd regulatory overreach from this administration: The Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency that is very happy to greenlight pharmaceutical drugs with horrible side effects, wants to pull most vitamins and other nutritional supplements off the shelves.

When the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) was passed in 1994, Congress intended there be a simple notification system for new supplements. But under draft regulations, the FDA is turning it into a pre-approval scheme—-one that Congress never intended. This will reduce the number of supplements sold and increase the cost of those that remain. In other words, the regulations as currently written translate into forced withdrawal from the market of many of many dietary supplements and skyrocketing prices if the supplements are allowed to be sold again.

Many holistic health freedom organizations have designated today, September 8, as a national "call-in day" to contact Congress to protest these draconian regulations.

Millions of Americans derive good results from natural dietary supplements. Isn't the Obama administration all about "healthcare"? While some supplements (especially those advertised on TV) lack quality ingredients or overstate their efficacy, existing law, voluntary industry standards, and the ability for consumers to research specific products on the Internet provides a self-correcting mechanism.

As we've said before, the fact that some businesses are unethical or corrupt provides no justification for turning over entire industries to bureaucratic central planners.