A law to take vitamins and supplements off the shelf

If you’re the kind of person who enjoys a glass of V-8 juice with your morning toast, who takes a calcium tablet with vitamin D for your bones, vitamin C to reduce inflammation, a selenium tablet to help prevent cancer, and fish oil capsules and co-enzyme Q-10 for your heart – then be worried – be very, very worried. Not because what you’re taking won’t work, but because you are stepping on the bottom-line profits of the pharmaceutical industry – and they don’t like it one single bit.

In fact, the drug companies dislike your personal wellness program so much they’ve recruited their friends at the Food and Drug Administration to regulate these products – juices, vitamins, herbal supplements and alternative treatments – right off the shelves of grocery, big box and health food stores all across America.

This proposed, sweeping legislation is known as FDA Docket 2006D-4080, “Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration,” and the opportunity for public comment lasts only until May 29. After that, the FDA, under Director Andrew C. von Eschenbach, has put the legislation on a fast track for implementation.

Under the proposed rule change, the FDA’s jurisdiction would extend to anything considered by them to be treatment for disease. That includes foods, supplements, vitamins, minerals, herbs and homeopathic remedies, among other things. Bob Unruh, in an April 24 column for World Net Daily, listed some possible consequences if this legislation passes, including that foods, supplements, vitamins and homeopathic remedies could disappear from store shelves, pending FDA “review” and health-store owners could be arrested for practicing medicine without a license. Growing and selling common herbs could get you arrested as a “drug dealer” and vegetable juice could be regulated as a drug.

The infuriating thing about all this is not that vitamins and supplements don’t work – but the fact that they work too well. About a third of the American public happily pays an estimated $6 billion a year on such products, figuring it’s better to spend a little to stay well than to pay through the nose for prescription drugs after you get sick. It’s not the $6 billion Big Pharma has targeted, after all, but the hundreds of billions they stand to reap if people are deprived of the foods and supplements that are keeping them healthy. Every healthy person represents one less customer for those money-making prescription medications Big Pharma loves to sell.

Of course, once the FDA “review” declares vitamins do work, they’ll be back on the market – by prescription – at more than 10 times their present price. Where similar legislation was passed under the World Trade Organization’s pro-pharmaceutical industry Codex rules in Germany and Norway, zinc tablets rose from $4 per bottle to $52; echinacea rose from $14 to $153. With profits like these, it becomes worth it to Big Pharma itself to sell supplements and vitamins.

But why, you ask, would the FDA listen to the pharmaceutical industry, when they’re the ones the FDA is supposed to be regulating? After all, wasn’t it Big Pharma that brought us the killer drug Vioxx, causing thousands of heart attacks and deaths before the FDA was forced to withdraw its approval? Even today, many questionable drugs are being marketed on national TV, with side effects so deadly the ads themselves have become sources for comic routines. Why then is the FDA choosing to come down hard on vitamins and juices that are extremely safe, and which offer time-tested benefits to our immune system and overall vitality?

Could it be that the FDA is loaded with people looking down the road to a career change – a time, perhaps, when they might leave the agency and get a job with, say, Big Pharma? A job with a salary of several hundred thousand dollars attached, perhaps, for a job well done? Would you believe such things go on?

I’m not expecting to change human nature here. But what we all must do for our own sakes is stop the FDA’s self-serving grab for power.

The third of the public who values their supplements, vitamins and juices – and anyone else who resents these Big Brother moves on our right to wellness – have until May 29 to let the FDA know what they think about proposal 2006D-0480. (You can comment online at www.fda.gov/cber/guidelines.htm). And write, phone or e-mail Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, as well. Your health and pocketbook could depend on it.

Leland Witting is a chaplain at Eastern Maine Medical Center and pastor of the Union Street Brick Church in Bangor. He can be reached at leewitting@midmaine.com.