crosspost on vitamins and herbs in EU.

[Guest guest]

Crosspost from another group.

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In case you haven't seen this - FYI

Kind regards,

Tamara ThZrsa

MayDay, Denmark

______________________________

 

The Times

 

London

 

November 22, 2002

 

Doctors reinforce their state monopoly

 

By Graham Searjeant, Financial Editor

 

 

SHOULD you have the money and the inclination, you can pop out today

and

buy a chainsaw, a highly geared racing bicycle or a gas stove. In

careless,

unlucky or malicious hands, these are frighteningly dangerous. Unlike

a

handgun, however, they have harmless purposes and can be extremely

useful. In a

free market, buyers are trusted to take sensible precautions and use

them

safely.

 

For a modest outlay, you can buy a jungle knife or a bottle of

chemical

brushwood killer for your garden, or if you are of voting age, a

fearsome set

of professional kitchen knives or enough vodka to kill yourself

several times

over. For small change you may purchase quantities of caustic bleach

in

containers designed only to protect toddlers, or some packs of rodent

poison.

To progress, we must cope with potential danger. Learning to avoid

danger and

to exercise restraint is part of growing up. Responsibility rests on

consumers

to make judgments and to behave sensibly.

 

When it comes to looking after our health, however, everything becomes

different. Try buying four dozen headache tablets from your local

supermarket

and you will find that the law forbids it. You will need to go to a

chemist's

shop or, at bigger supermarkets, the pharmacy desk, where officialdom

assumes

that the assistant will be able to tell if we are suicidal. Even

then, your

purchase of aspirin or ibuprofen will be severely limited. The result

is higher

prices. Competition has been artificially hobbled. A small bubble

pack will

cost the same as a large bottle of tablets used to.

 

A similar fate is about to befall all those vitamins, minerals and

herbal

remedies that we buy in the high street, the back street or by mail

order. This

week the Save our Supplements campaign handed a petition with more

than a

million signatures to Parliament, urging MPs not to enact legislation

that will

restrict dosages, ban many products and introduce a prior approval

system for

new formulations similar to that for high-powered new pharmaceutical

drugs.

Public opinion will not affect legislation.

 

The new restrictive regime will enact two EU directives, the Food

Supplements Directive and the Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products

Directive.

The Consumers Association, one-time champion of choice and value for

money, has

backed them. The first directive includes a list of permitted

products and

strengths. Those not on the list would have to prove they were useful,

notoriously difficult for products that are conditioners rather than

remedies.

Ingenious consumers can easily get round dosage limits, for instance

by

swallowing a larger number of weaker vitamin C tablets. So we can

expect limits

on quantities that can be sold, driving prices up further. Innovation

is likely

to become uneconomic for anyone except drug multinationals, for whom

competition and low prices are anathema.

 

The herbal directive will hit fewer consumers pockets but may inflict

even more damage. Remedies that can be proved to have been sold here

for ages

will be exempt from the prior approval regime, but innovation will

come to a

halt. Immigrant families from cultures used to herbal remedies face

the worst

discrimination, along with the small businesses that serve them. They

must

alter their ways, shut up shop or turn to the black market. The

market for such

products will not disappear. After all, relatively few people seem to

have died

from them.

 

Nearly a quarter of Britons smoke cigarettes, decades after deadly

side-effects became apparent. So unapproved preparations will be

smuggled via

the internet, sold under the counter or supplied by semi-criminal

gangs, like

cannabis. Three factors are at work here: the EU's compulsion to

harmonise to

the tiniest detail, bureaucrats' instinctive contempt for small

business and

the medical profession's obsession with protecting its own monopoly

privileges.

In Britain, this is reinforced by paranoia in the state medical

system about

private competition. Even if medicines and supplements not prescribed

by

doctors were placebos, studies suggest that these can harmlessly aid

consumers'

psychological well-being. It is for buyers to decide if they get

value for

money.

 

Many might admit that they adopt the alternative approach only because

mainstream healthcare is limited to a National Health Service riddled

by

restrictive practices. Doctors and the NHS monopoly insist, however,

that we

should not worry our little heads about health matters. That is their

prerogative. Except in times of cold or flu epidemics, we are

discouraged from

treating ourselves. Internet diagnostic services are denounced as

dangerously

unreliable, although doctors know that a sizeable proportion of their

own

diagnoses are consistently wrong. By the same self-interested

reasoning, proven

drugs are banned from general sale, even by thousands of highly

qualified but

under-used pharmacists. In Japan, a wide range of drugs and

antibiotics is

available over the counter. On average, people live longer there.

 

Any approved drug in use for five years should automatically come into

general commerce unless the side-effects are so bad that it should be

used only

in extreme cases. This year's Mintel survey of lifestyles found that

more of us

now turn first to pharmacists for health advice.

 

Yet what should be a fast-growing high street health trade is stifled

by

a predatory NHS. Even a fledgeling chain offering the walk-in medical

care that

most GPs no longer provide was quickly undercut by the state

monopoly. Under

the new EU-inspired laws, more products will require a prescription,

giving

doctors more power and more work they cannot do. Never mind. Stopping

competition is the top priority.

 

 

 

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=

 

 

Sunday Telegraph

 

Christopher Booker's Notebook

(Filed: 24/11/2002)

 

 

Bitter Pills

Foot and mouth inquiry

To the very last penny

Academic qualification

 

Bitter Pills

 

A small but fast-growing Daventry company, which recently won a

Government-sponsored award for making " a positive impact on society " ,

is among

thousands of firms likely to be put out of business by two European

Union

directives which mark a remarkable victory for the power of lobbying

by big

business.

 

Viridian, run by Cheryl Thallon and John Steenson, employs 13 people

making

60 specialist vitamin and herbal products sold in 400 health stores

nationwide.

The company is dedicated to the highest health and environmental

standards, and

donates half its profits to children's environmental charities. It

is, however,

precisely the kind of business that will find it impossible to

survive after

the coming into force of the two directives on nutritional

supplements and

herbal remedies, now being rushed through the Brussels law-making

process in

time for EU enlargement.

 

The effect of the new laws, for which the pharmaceutical industry has

been

lobbying for years, places all herbal medicines and vitamin and

mineral

supplements on the same regulatory basis as mass-market drugs

produced by the

giant manufacturers. More than 300 widely-used minerals will be banned

altogether and the costs of licensing each individual product - up to

£2,000 a

time - and further regulatory requirements such as laboratory testing

of each

batch, will be prohibitive for thousands of smaller manufacturers.

More than

8,000 products used by millions of UK customers will vanish from the

shelves,

driving all but the largest health-food chains out of business.

 

The advantage for the drug manufacturers is obvious, as they hope to

mop up a

market worth £2.4 billion a year with the mass-produced vitamin and

mineral

products they alone can afford to license, and the synthetic drugs

that will be

the only substitute for the subtler herbal remedies, such as

echinacea, ginseng

and St John's wort, that millions prefer.

 

 

In recent years the commercial lobby has been in overdrive, with wild

claims

that vitamins such as B-6 and herbal remedies can be blamed for

thousands of

" adverse reactions " , even deaths. Meanwhile, the regulators, the

Medicines

Control Agency and the EU's new Medicines Evaluation Agency - which

are almost

entirely funded by licensing fees from the pharmaceutical companies -

remain

strangely quiet about the thousands of deaths caused each year by

synthetic

drugs they themselves have licensed as safe to use.

 

Now the commercial giants are on the brink of victory. There was

something

peculiarly poignant last week about the petition carrying a million

signatures,

including those of Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Elton John, that was

presented to

Parliament, begging MPs to do something to stop these new laws. The

power has

now passed elsewhere, as those lobbyists know only too well.

 

Among those who will pay the price are thousands of small

manufacturers such

as Viridian; the hundreds of health stores that will have to close;

and the

millions of customers whose freedom of choice will be dramatically

reduced,

both in terms of products that they are no longer able to buy, and

the often

diminished quality and higher price of those that the regulators

permit to

remain.

 

 

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=

 

Josef Hasslberger

+39 06 635884

 

 

My personal home page on physics,energy technology

and economic issues: http://www.hasslberger.com