Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010

If you value your health and access to natural supplements, then please join me in taking action against McCain's atrocious bill!

"The bill being spearheaded by Senators John McCain and Byron Dorgan represents the kind of federal regulation that is not only ineffective, but also suffocates innovation in ways that inflict permanent damage to this nation’s economic vitality.

The bill supposedly originates from the controversy surrounding the use of steroids by Major League Baseball players. Since some unethical companies illegally sold steroid drugs as “dietary supplements,” certain members of the Senate (i.e., John McCain and Byron Dorgan) appear to have been deceived into believing that the FDA needs to be given additional power to ban dietary supplements across the board.

The fact is that the FDA has all the legal authority it needs to remove supplements that contain illegal drugs from the market. The FDA has failed to do its job, and there are companies selling dietary supplements that contain prescription drugs. If the FDA continues to fail to do its job, then these companies will continue to sell drug-tainted supplements no matter what new laws are “created” by Congress.

The outrage over this bill expressed by so many supplement consumers is that it gives the FDA broad and arbitrary new powers to remove natural products from the marketplace. Since the FDA (and Congress) is dominated by large pharmaceutical interests, this bill will effectively enable drug companies to control which supplements you have access to.

You may recall the FDA’s ban last year of a more effective form of vitamin B6 (pyridoxamine) because a pharmaceutical company wants to have it approved as an expensive new prescription drug to treat diabetic kidney failure.

If McCain’s bill is passed, it will make it far easier for pharmaceutical companies to file use patents on what are now inexpensive dietary supplements and convert them into outrageously priced “drugs”. Just look at the cost of prescription drug fish oil that so many cardiologists are prescribing to their patients. It costs about seven times more than the same amount of EPA/DHA fish oil you can buy as a dietary supplement. Just imagine if the FDA was given arbitrary power to ban omega-3 dietary supplements!

In order to mislead the public about the true nature of this bill, it has been named the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010 (DSSA). It purports to protect consumers, but the question arises, from what?

According to a published report by the American Association of Poison Control Centers, no one died in the year 2008 as a result of taking a dietary supplement.1 The facts are that legitimate reports of deaths caused by dietary supplements this century are virtually non-existent."

Link: http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/Dietary-Supplement-Safe...