Dietary Supplements Under Imminent Threat
By James South M.A.
The European Union Food Supplements Directive (FSD) is
scheduled to go into effect in August 2005.(1) This EU law will control
food supplement sales and manufacturing in the 25 EU countries.
It will allow only certain vitamins and minerals to be
sold. typically at potencies only one to three times the RDA (Recommended Daily
Allowance), and will outlaw many of the most natural, bioavailable nutrient
forms, such as chromium picolinate, mixed tocopherols E and selenomethionine.
Entire product categories, such as amino acids, will be outlawed. Under a
related Traditional Medicines Directive, herbs may be reclassified as drugs, and
stringently regulated accordingly. It is estimated that 5,000 products currently
sold in England, Ireland, Holland and Sweden will be outlawed.(1)
The Health Minister of New Zealand has just recently agreed
to turn hver regulation of New Zealand's freedom-oriented nutritional supplement
market to a new "trans-Tasman" Agency dominated by Australia, which is
extremely anti-supplement. Australia recently removed 1,600 supplement products
(80 percent of those available!) from its health food stores. In Australia,
under its Therapeutic Goods Act, nutritional supplements are regulated more like
drugs than food supplements. The managing director of this agency is based in
Australia. The agency is incorporated under that country's laws and will have
complete power to issue any anti-supplement rules and orders it wishes to govern
New Zealand's health food marketplace.(2)
During the summer of 2003, Canada quietly harmonized its
supplement regulations to those of Australia. They have not yet been
implemented; implementation will only occur gradually, in order to avoid waking
up Canadian supplement users to the threat until after it's too late .(3)
The MERCOSUR nations of South America (Argentina, Brazil,
Paraguay, Uraguay, and soon to include Bolivia and Chile) have recently agreed
to harmonize their supplement regulations to the EU Food Supplements Directive.(4)
MERCOSUR has been called a "building block toward the Free Trade Area of
the Americas (FTAA)."(5) President Bush, in a 2002 speech, called
for the finalizing of the FTAA, comprising 34 countries including the USA, by
January 2005.
From November 1 through 5, 2004, the Codex Committee on
Nutrition and Foods for Special Dietary Uses is scheduled to meet in Borm,
Germany. Approximately 50 nations will attend. They will be finalizing worldwide
standards for nutritional supplements, with final ratification expected to occur
in June 2005. The 25 EU nations make up half of the attendees, and Mr. Basil
Mathioudakis will head the EU delegation, and be able to vote their 25 votes
(one vote per country) as a bloc.(6) Mr. Mathioudakis was the person
chiefly responsible for drafting the EU's anti-supplement FSD.(6) It is
expected that the EU delegation will be pushing hard to achieve world supplement
standards more or less equivalent to the EU Food Supplements Directive.
Our Supplements Next?
You may well be thinking that because we live in the
"land of the free," what has occurred in those poor countries like
England, New Zealand and Canada can't happen here. If you're legally savvy, you
might even point out that U.S. Statute 19 USC 3512 safeguards our domestic laws
(such as DSHEA, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act) from outside
interference, prohibiting any other government or trade agency from forcing us
to conform to standards that conflict with existing U.S, laws. And yet that's
not the whole story.
Codex and the WTO
The Codex Committee that's rapidly completing its 10-year
work of creating world nutrition supplement standards is a part of a larger
organization, the Codex Alimentarius (Latin for "food code”). This agency
was set up in 1963 under the joint auspices of the United Nations' World Health
Organization and Food and Agricultural Organization.(1)
It is charged with creating comprehensive worldwide food
standards to maximize the ease and safety of world food trade. It is also
supposed to protect consumers. In the mid-1990s, the Codex Alimentarius
organization signed an agreement with the World Trade Organization (WTO), by
which Codex creates trade standards that the WTO can then use to resolve
international trade disputes.(6) The WTO is the group charged with
enforcement of the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which the USA
signed onto in 1994.
In a letter to Congressman Dan Burton in 2001, Congressmen
Ron Paul and Peter DeFazio made the following observations: "While Codex
has no direct authority to force Americans to adopt stringent regulations of
dietary supplements, we are concerned that the United States may be forced to
adopt Codex standards as a result of the United States’ status as a member of
the WTO. According to an August 1999 Report of the Congressional Research
Service, 'As a member of the WTO, the United States does commit to act in
accordance with the rules of the multilateral body. It [the U.S.] is legally
obligated to ensure national laws do not conflict with WTO rules.' If Congress
were to refuse to 'harmonize' U.S. laws according to strict Codex/WTO
guidelines, a WTO 'dispute resolution panel' could find that the United States
is engaging in unfair trade because of our failure to 'harmonize' our
regulations with the rest of the world. In any such trade dispute, the scales
are tipped in favor of countries using the Codex standards because of WTO rules
presuming that a nation who has adopted Codex has not erected an unfair trade
barrier. Therefore, in a dispute with a country that has adopted the Codex
standards, it is highly probable that America would lose and be subject to heavy
sanctions unless Congress harmonized our laws with the other WTO countries.”
The "heavy sanctions" referred to are billions of
dollars in tariffs (import taxes) that WTO would authorize WTO Codex nations to
lay on U.S. exports (and not just on supplement exports). This would make U.S.
goods overpriced in the world market, and thus hard to sell, possibly leading to
U.S. trade losses in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. The U.S.
Congress would surely cave in under such pressure, repeal DSHEA and adopt the
anti-supplemerit Codex regulations. This is not just speculation. The U5
Congress has already given in, in past WTO disputes, to avoid crippling trade
sanctions.
The Hour is Late ...
Make no mistake about it. There is a worldwide effort to
extinguish vitamin freedom all over the world, including (especially) the USA.
It is being driven by a consortium of drug companies and power-hungry regulatory
bureaucrats (such as the FDA).
In 1997, acting FDA Commissioner Michael A. Friedman stated
in a speech before the Senate Labor Committee: "FDA plans to amend its
regulations and procedures for consideration of standards adopted by Codex. This
action is being taken to provide for the systematic review of Codex standards in
order to enhance consumer protection, promote international harmonization and
fulfil the obligations of the United States under international agreements.”(8)
In November 2000, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) issued a press
release regarding dietary supplements. A working group of the TABD had just
agreed to "Encourage the scientific bodies responsible for the evaluation
of the safety of total intakes of vitamins and minerals (EU Scientific Committee
on Food and U.S. Food and Nutrition Board) to cooperate closely to harmonize
setting upper safe levels for vitamins and minerals.”(9) The press
release also stated: "The TABD ... seeks ... the removal of ... differences
in the EU and U.S. regulatory systems.”
The TABD has 120 members, mostly pharmaceutical-type
vitamin companies. Many U.S. vitamin companies (some that sell in health food
stores, but more that sell in grocery stores and pharmacies) are now owned by,
or partnered with, pharmaceutical drug companies. The world drug industry wishes
to remove consumers' ability to maintain their health or fight disease through
nutritional supplements, thereby forcing them back into the much more lucrative
toximolecular pharmaceutical drug market. U.S. pharmaceutical drug sales are
$150 billion to S200 billion yearly, compared to $18 billion spent on
supplements.
... But All is Not Yet Lost
In spite of the fact that the innovative, relatively free
U.S. supplement market could begin to disappear as early as 2006, all is not yet
lost. There are various actions we can still take.
The Alliance for Natural Health has filed a lawsuit in the
European Court of Justice to overturn the Food Supplement Directive on multiple
legal grounds. It has been referred to the court on an expedited basis. It is
being litigated by a law firm that has already succeeded in overturning other EU
directives. If it can be overturned before the Codex regulations are finalized,
it will take much of the steam out of the EU Codex delegation's efforts to model
final Codex regulations on the EU Food Supplements Directive.
You can help by donating money (even $5 or $10 helps) for
this costly battle to the Alliance at www.alliance-natural-health.org. Please do
it now! The supplements you save may be your own.
Next, please write, call, fax and e-mail your U.S. senators
and representatives. Urge your senators to oppose S. 722, the Dietary Supplement
Safety Act, and urge your Congressperson to oppose H.R. 3377, the Dietary
Supplement Access and Awareness Act. These misnamed bills would hand great new
powers to the FDA to treat dietary supplements as drugs, doing away with most of
the protection that consumers and the supplement industry gained under DSHEA.
Also ask your Senators to oppose S. 1538, the DSHEA Full Implementation and
Enforcement Act. This bill would give the FDA $105 million to use to harass
vitamin manufacturers and health food stores under the FDA's biased,
anti-supplement interpretation of DSHEA.
Also, let elected officials in Congress know you don't want
them to buckle under any future WTO pressure to conform U.S. laws to
anti-supplement Codex standards. Please realize that pharmaceutical industry
lobbyists donate $ 100 million yearly to the re-election campaigns of
representatives and senators. Unless they get large numbers of angry, forceful
letters, calls, emails, etc., they will naturally tend to take the
pharmaceutical industry's interests into account before yours.
You must quickly get educated on this fight. The
International Advocates for Health Freedom (www.iahf.org) is run by John Hammell.
It's a no-nonsense grassroots organization that's been fighting Codex and trying
to alert America to the Codex danger since 1996. Sign up for IAHF's free e-mail
alerts. IAHF is a one-man operation, but John is a human dynamo, with world-wide
contacts fighting Codex, the EU FSD, etc. Please make at least a small donation
(even $5 or $10 helps) to IAHF at www.iahf.org. John is the most active,
best-educated, constantly working opponent of the global war against supplements
that 1 know of.
Also, please contact your U.S. senators and representatives
about the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and tell them you want no part of it.
The European Union started out as a trade group, and now it's a supranational
government, complete with Parliament and Court of Justice, that dictates the
laws of all 25 member nations. FTAA is slated to do the same for the USA. Once
it begins, it's only a matter of time until a similar bureaucracy will be set up
to remake our laws (and do away with our borders) here in America. Visit
www.stoptheftaa.org to learn more.
Finally, contact your U.S. representatives and senators and
tell them to support U.S. Rep. Ron Paul's H.R. 1146, the American Sovereignty
Restoration Act. This legislation will make the U.S. Constitution the supreme
law of the land again. Currently, Supreme Court rulings from the 20th century
have made treaties, such as GATT/WTO/Codex, superior to the United States
Constitution and laws, overriding them whenever there's a conflict.
Time is short, folks. If we don't all do the work
now-donate a little money, study, spread the word to your family, friends and
neighbors, contact your elected representative s-the supplements we now take for
granted may be gone within 18 to 36 months. The handwriting is on the wall,
although it's not yet written in permanent ink. Let's erase it now, while we
still can!
References
1. www.thchealtherusader.com/pgs/article-0104-ban.shtmi
2. www.yrnip.com/pubarchive-show-message.php'?
jham+222
3 . www.ymlp.corri/pubarchive-show-message.php'.
jham+230
4. backgrounder at www.iahf.com/index3.htmi
5. www.stoptheftaa.org/artman/Publish/artiele-142.shtml
6.www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2004/03/22/codex-ali-
mentarius-a-threat-to-your~-vitamin-supplements.htm
7. wZ iahf.com/iadsa/oversight-letter.html
8. www.iahf.com/iadsa/fda_harinonize.html
9. www.cmusa.org/.shellnr I 12000.html
