DSHEA: It’s Not Just a Good Idea, It’s the Law!
One of my favorite tee shirts adorned the sweaty body of a contra dancer at Princeton University some years ago.
It sported a picture of Albert Einstein and his famous mane of hair with a quote that read, “E=mc2: It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law!”
Good point.
Some things are more than just a neat concept. DSHEA is one of them.
The 1994 Dietary Supplements Health Education Act (or DSHEA) is a good idea and it is the law, too. In fact, in my estimation, DSHEA is one of the best laws passed by the US Congress. If you are interested in getting healthy and staying that way in a stressful, toxic world, DSHEA is an important ally in your quest to find natural solutions to your health needs.
Passed because of public outrage at the thought of losing access to dietary supplements, 100 Senators bowed to logic, good sense and political expediency and passed DSHEA unanimously despite the tremendous opposition of the drug companies. DSHEA says that supplements are foods and, as such, they cannot be limited, although they can, like other foods, be regulated and kept safe. Supplements and herbs are food so they can have no upper limits. After all, there are no upper limits on lettuce, rutabagas or lamb, so why should there be any one vitamins, minerals and co factors? There shouldn’t.
DSHEA seemed like a real popular victory in 1994. It had been vigorously opposed by Big Pharma (which was big then, but not nearly as big as it is now) and still the people had prevailed to the extent that no senator dared oppose their will. Once DSHEA was a matter of law, health freedom and the right to choose natural options were secure. Right? Unfortunately, wrong.
Over the intervening decade-plus since 1994, attempts to weaken, circumvent or gut DSHEA keep cropping up. These threats to your health freedom come from lobbyists who are there to help Congress see the gleam of money (last year, according to USA Today, April 26, 2005, Big Pharma spent more than $758 million on Congressional Drug Lobbying). That’s an astonishing $7.48 million per senator!
And what do the people who pay the lobbyists get?
An onslaught of attacks against our right to take as much Vitamin C or Co Q 10 or Echinacea as we want to. In other words, both lawmakers (like Dick Durban who tried to gut DSHEA in the last Congress with S722) and bureaucrats who work for the FDA, continually look for ways to take away your right to determine your own health course. They claim to be seeking to “protect” you (from yourself?) but that is not the real reason these lobbyists are working so hard to restrict your access to nutritional supplements.
During the previous (108th) Congress, a spate of bills were introduced to make the playing ground between drugs (high risk, high profit) and supplements (low risk, low profits) even more uneven. None of them passed. But while that was going on, the FDA was using its regulatory power to attack safe and effective herbs like Echinacea and ephedra (attacked relentlessly in the establishment-obedient press as a dangerous substance with nary a regard for the truth) . In April, a Federal judge reviewed the science (“unscientific and irrelevant”, said the judge) and the premise (“unscientific and irrelevant”, said the judge) for the ephedra ban. Most important, she reaffirmed that the intent of the Congress and the American People in DSHEA was to make available health aids like supplements, nutrients and herbs as foods and let people decide how to use them. The irrational and arbitrary ephedra ban for the low dose herb was reversed by a Federal judge.
A note about ephedra: it is erroneously blamed for a very small number of deaths. Perhaps 8 deaths MIGHT be related to its incorrect overuse in the presence of disease and pharmaceutical drugs, dehydration and kidney failure over the last 15 years (and every one of those is only questionably related to the herb). Aspirin, an unregulated but potent drug, kills 1500 people in the US per year.
You probably remember a lot of poison press about the “dangers” of ephedra and very little about the reversal of the ban two months ago. The press carried the first story to an extreme degree, and the second hardly at all. But where is the outcry to ban aspirin? Probably whispered in the same official corridors as the inaudible FDA outcry to ban Vioxx, I would imagine, wouldn’t you?
Yours in health and freedom,
Rima E. Laibow, M.D.
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
http://www.healthfreedomusa.org/
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