- Sun Feb 28, 2010 8:29 pm
#1218
If a person feels ill or under the weather, there are many things he or she can try to feel better. Firstly, there is the medicine-free route, centered on diet and exercise. However, many people do decide to get a little help from vitamins, herbs, HGH releasers and supplements. The market has a wide variety of chemical and herbal helpers—for now. If a certain piece of new legislation is passed, it is possible that consumers will have far fewer products to choose from.
The bill in question is John McCain’s Dietary Supplements Safety Act, which would amend the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, making it subject to more restrictions under the FDA. The FDA can draw up a roster of permitted products, in effect banning everything not on that list and discouraging the development of new supplements. Furthermore, it will be far easier for products to be pulled from the market under suspicion of being adulterated. The legal and bureaucratic requirements to prevent such “pulling” or to get products back on shelves have the potential to cripple smaller companies. Of course, this would give an even bigger market share to the larger drug companies.
Some people might welcome the shutting down of small supplement or drug companies. We might think that large pharmaceutical companies have the “authoritative” versions of the best drugs. Other products must be scams or bad copies of the drugs corporations make and market towards us.
We should think twice before trusting the word or authority of large pharmaceutical companies. Remember that these entities are far from being disinterested parties, since they stand to make more money if they can label competitors as illegitimate and dangerous. Furthermore, they have also shown themselves to be willing to act in unethical ways in the pursuit of more profit. Ample evidence of this is shown if we take a more global view of the pharmaceutical industry. Large companies, mainly in Western countries like the United States, have lobbied governments to keep a tight hold on patents, so that it is difficult for Third World countries to make more affordable, generic versions of critical drugs. As a result, large numbers of poor people in developing countries die because they cannot afford their medicine.
In other words, do not allow big pharmaceutical companies to have a monopoly on your opinions, no matter how hard they try to have a monopoly on the market.
If you would like to do something about this situation, you can contact your congressman (or congresswoman) or one or more senators to act against McCain’s bill. If you would like to take the “classic” route, write a letter. Otherwise, you might try to contact legislators via their websites. If you wish, you can also try to make more indirect but wider impact by writing to newspapers and magazines. You will not be contacting your politician directly, but the wider exposure offered by having your letter published might actually make your opinions more influential than if you wrote a letter that only the politician and his or her staff would see.
The bill in question is John McCain’s Dietary Supplements Safety Act, which would amend the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, making it subject to more restrictions under the FDA. The FDA can draw up a roster of permitted products, in effect banning everything not on that list and discouraging the development of new supplements. Furthermore, it will be far easier for products to be pulled from the market under suspicion of being adulterated. The legal and bureaucratic requirements to prevent such “pulling” or to get products back on shelves have the potential to cripple smaller companies. Of course, this would give an even bigger market share to the larger drug companies.
Some people might welcome the shutting down of small supplement or drug companies. We might think that large pharmaceutical companies have the “authoritative” versions of the best drugs. Other products must be scams or bad copies of the drugs corporations make and market towards us.
We should think twice before trusting the word or authority of large pharmaceutical companies. Remember that these entities are far from being disinterested parties, since they stand to make more money if they can label competitors as illegitimate and dangerous. Furthermore, they have also shown themselves to be willing to act in unethical ways in the pursuit of more profit. Ample evidence of this is shown if we take a more global view of the pharmaceutical industry. Large companies, mainly in Western countries like the United States, have lobbied governments to keep a tight hold on patents, so that it is difficult for Third World countries to make more affordable, generic versions of critical drugs. As a result, large numbers of poor people in developing countries die because they cannot afford their medicine.
In other words, do not allow big pharmaceutical companies to have a monopoly on your opinions, no matter how hard they try to have a monopoly on the market.
If you would like to do something about this situation, you can contact your congressman (or congresswoman) or one or more senators to act against McCain’s bill. If you would like to take the “classic” route, write a letter. Otherwise, you might try to contact legislators via their websites. If you wish, you can also try to make more indirect but wider impact by writing to newspapers and magazines. You will not be contacting your politician directly, but the wider exposure offered by having your letter published might actually make your opinions more influential than if you wrote a letter that only the politician and his or her staff would see.
