Fwd: Letter to Sen.Clinton on Supplement Restriction Bill-S.722

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arnoldgore

Wed, 3 Sep 2003 07:12:30 EDT

Letter to Sen.Clinton on Supplement Restriction Bill-S.722

 

I recently sent an email on Senator Durbin's bill to give FDA power to require

supplement manufacturers to keep records of adverse supplement reactions--that

are rare-and prove and test the supplement to show it did not cause the

reaction. The bill had 3 o-sponsors now. Schumer and Clinton of NY and Feinstein

of CA.

 

Below is my letter to Sen.Clinton.

 

Consumers Health Freedom Coalition

 

720 Fort Washington Avenue New York, NY 10040

212-795-6460

 

 

September 2, 2003

 

Senator Hillary Clinton

US Senate

Washington, DC 20510

 

Dear Senator Clinton:

 

I am writing about the Supplement Safety Act S.722. I hope you will reconsider

your co-co-sponsorship of this bill. The bill ostensibly deals with the safety

issue, but in reality tries to place a burden on dietary supplement

manufacturers that is not warranted on the basis of real safety concerns. Last

year there were a total of 16 deaths attributed to ALL dietary supplements.

Excessive doses of ephedra were suspected in the majority of these cases,

although the supplement link was not really proven. Some of the high profile

cases for which ephedra was blamed, involving professional athletes, have even

found only traces of ephedra in the blood or no trace at all. At the same time

there were in excess of 106,000 deaths from adverse reactions to prescription

drugs in hospitals alone as reported on JAMA, April 15,1998;279(5):1200-1205,

from prescription drugs taken " as directed " -NOT OVERDOSES. The Food & Drug

Administration (FDA) has done nothing to investigate and stop these

incidents, but has focused its attack on the handful of cases possibly

attributable to dietary supplements to redirect public attention from the real

safety problem. The bill proposes to add reporting and possible safety testing

to an industry that sells a non patentable product in a competitive market,

where margins of profit are too small to afford the additional expense of

recordkeeping and testing for an insignificantly small number of incidents. The

bill allows the possibility of eliminating a supplement throughout the country,

until the manufacturer proves innocence of the allegations. Since no one

supplement maker has the incentive through proprietary patents to the

supplement-and cannot make the money back, the tests requested might never be

done and consumers will lose access to it.

FDA is in effect saying the supplement is sold too cheaply to prove quality

control that is required of prescription drugs that are completely foreign to

the human body and its metabolism. Holding dietary supplements such as Vitamin

C, Vitamin A etc to these standards will pose unwarranted costs that would allow

FDA to limit the availability of

a natural product that competes with their " duly licensed " prescription drugs

that many consumers want to avoid using. FDA should not be allowed to set up

artificial barriers to the availability of nutritional supplements in order to

assure a growing market for prescription drugs.

 

As you are familiar with attempts to introduce competition to the health care

marketplace, there is an area of competition between FDA approved prescription

drugs and some dietary supplements. Numerous scientific studies have been

published in peer reviewed medical journals establishing these beneficial uses.

Many consumers prefer to use the more natural safer nutritional supplements

instead of high priced drugs that have serious side effects and usually do not

address the underlying health problem, but merely eliminate some symptoms of

disease.

I personally was able to completely cure the epilepsy that I had for 25 years

when I started to take high amounts of the B Complex vitamins and changed my

diet. This has worked for many others also. The market for these vitamins and

other nutrients should remain easily available, restricting the manufacturer

with arbitrary costs and regulations to put them on an even footing with

prescription drug manufacturers, whose product has inherently unknown toxicity

levels is not fair to those using or manufacturing these products. I hope you

will recall that when DSHEA was passed in 1994, there were more letters to

congress on this single issue than any issue since the Saturday Night Massacre

of Watergate in 1973. When signing the bill President Clinton praised the

Congress for assuring the rights of health conscious consumers to have access to

supplements and to be given truthful information about the product. This law

should not be overridden just because the FDA and the drug companies

that seek to control it, are upset that the Federal Courts have directed them

to comply with the law they fought before and after passage.

 

I hope you will reconsider your co-sponsorship of this bill.

 

Sincerely,

 

______________

Arnold Gore