One more step toward…
Forget terrorism for a minute, because right now it’s time to activate the level orange bureaucracy alert…
Last year, I wrote in Real Health about our government’s attempt to wrap their greedy tentacles around the supplement industry with a bill before Congress ironically monikered the “Dietary Supplement Fairness Act.” To refresh your memory (or bring you up to speed if you weren’t one of my readers back then), this bill ostensibly provided tax-based subsidization for vitamin and nutrient supplements – “nutraceuticals” by their nomenclature. Sounds good, right?
Not really, because a major provision of the bill stipulates that recipients undergo a battery of tests to determine the need for supplements – and their effectiveness once you’ve taken them. Also, they’ll have to be controlled and authorized via a supervising doctor, just like… PRESCRIPTION DRUGS!
The reason I bring this shameless sham up again is because of a news story I came across in Reuters a few weeks ago. It outlined a new series of proposed supplement-industry production standards – quality control measures, in other words. And guess who’d be holding the reins? You got it: Big Brother himself, the good old FDA…
You know, the guys that regulate PRESCRIPTION DRUGS!
According to the article, an FDA spokesperson claims that both the American public and the supplement industry itself (!) want these measures in place to guard against false or inaccurate claims about what’s in their supplement bottles – or against tainted or contaminated products. Again, sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it?
Well, think again. Like the “Dietary Supplement Fairness Act,” these measures (which are scheduled to take effect next year (2004)) are just one more in a long line of thinly veiled attempts to insert big government into previously unregulated areas of your lives and health. Why? Because with increased regulation come increased tax revenues – both from your wallet and from the industry’s coffers. In this respect, it’d be kind of like the … PRESCRIPTION DRUG business!
Yes, it’s time to face the hard, depressing fact that as long as the American public gravitates toward alternatives to mainstream medicine – like safe and natural dietary supplementation – those vultures up on The Hill are going to try to wrap their fat little fingers around them until they’re over-priced, politicized, over-regulated, and ineffective.
Kind of like – oh, I don’t know . . . PRESCRIPTION DRUGS!
Written by W. C. Douglass for Real Health News, and published on DrKelley.info, May 10, 2003. Embedded links (if any) may no longer be active. (Ed. 01.11.11)
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