Slimeball Waxman Hides Bill

HENRY WAXMAN’S SNEAK ATTACK ON DIETARY SUPPLEMENTS

Last week and over the weekend, the Internet was buzzing about a heretofore undetected provision Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., had slipped into the Wall Street financial reform bill that the House passed in December – a provision critics warned could devastate the nutritional supplement industry with excessive regulations, driving up the costs of supplements or removing them from the market altogether.

“The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) …includes language going far beyond finance,” the Alliance for Natural Health-USA, a D.C.-based health freedom advocacy group, stated in an April 27 report, with the warning: “This language could be used for an end run around the Dietary Supplement Health and Safety Act (DSHEA), the legislation that governs dietary supplement regulation by the FDA.”

DSHEA was passed by Congress in 1994 in response to public outrage over a series of FDA armed raids on health food stores and alternative medicine clinics; it’s the landmark law designed to protect access to dietary supplements and to information about these products.

The Waxman provision does not affect DSHEA. It has nothing to do with lending institutions or financial matters, nor does it refer to the Food and Drug Administration, the agency tasked with regulating dietary supplements. Instead, it deals with the Federal Trade Commission, an agency set up in 1914 to protect the public from allegedly deceptive advertising and “anti-competition” business practices.

“A direct attack on supplements would take the form of an amendment to DSHEA, since that legislation governs FDA regulation of supplements,” ANH-USA explains. “In this case, Waxman has left DSHEA alone, and has instead inserted language in the Wall St. ‘reform’ bill that gives the Federal Trade Commission important new powers that could be used to circumvent key supplement protections in DSHEA.”