Enforcing current supplement laws. (dc updates).(dietary supplements)

A legislator's vision, destined to become a bill and perhaps even a law, must travel down a long and tortuous road before the average consumer needs to adapt to it. Most bills, despite being introduced with much ballyhoo by their sponsors, never make it onto a hearing calendar or out of committee before their lives are cut short by the end of a congressional session.

So when we at the National Nutritional Foods Association (NNFA) hear that legislators are proposing changes to dietary supplement regulations, we take it seriously--even though we know that proposed changes won't come easily. To needlessly alarm our members or consumers about a threat that's unlikely to materialize would be both irresponsible and counterproductive. Given that context, I want to alert you to perhaps the single most credible threat the supplement industry has faced since the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA)--the federal oversight law for dietary supplements--was passed in 1994.

In the past few months, two separate Senate hearings that focused primarily on the herbal product ephedra have been broadly critical of the adequacy of DSHEA in regard to consumer health and safety. During the latest hearing, held in October 2002, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said, "It's clear to me that DSHEA doesn't protect American consumers." As he had in a previous hearing in July 2002 concerning ephedra and weight loss, Durbin outlined steps he would take, including modifying the current definition of supplement categories "to highlight the differences between vitamins and minerals, potent herbal products that act like drugs and animal derivatives."

Depending on your perspective, some of these suggestions may seem reasonable to you. Some even seem reasonable to us. What is unreasonable is the suggestion that current regulations are inadequate, and more legislation is needed. The problem isn't the law itself, but the implementation of that law by its chief regulatory body, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Even Sen. Durbin, who was unstinting in his criticism of the dietary supplement industry, recognized that the FDA is taking too little action too ...