Health Activists & Consumers /
The Drumbeat of misinformation on the safety and your continued availability of vitamins, minerals and herbs is under threat.  As you have seen the Federal Courts have repeatedly upheld the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act (DSHEA) allowing more claims to be made advertising dietary supplements.  

Finally an FDA commissioner was ready to actually ready to comply with the 9 year old law.  This threat to the monopoly of prescription drugs for everything and limitations on information about alternatives led Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois to introduce the Supplement Safety Act (S.722) that would treat nutritional supplements like drugs and shift the burden and cost of tracking safety from the FDA to the manufacturers.

 
In the highly competitive non-patented vitamin market, this high cost burden cannot be easily shifted to consumers through monopolistic pricing as with patented drugs.
 
The bill has now been co-sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer and Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York and Sen. Diane Feinstein of California.  It is time to call and write these Senators  - see below for local phone numbers for these 3 senators.
 
Impress upon them your concern that this bill supposedly about safety, will restrict the availability of supplements by imposing costly testing and record keeping for the very low incidence of injury from all supplements compared to the huge numbers of deaths and injuries from prescription drugs.  The outpouring of support for DSHEA in 1994 resulted in more mail on this issue than any other issue since the height of the Watergate Scandal-the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973.

 
Those of you in other states can find information on your US Senators, each state has two senators at http://www.senate.gov :

  
Sen. Charles Schumer: 

                                    New York City office tel. 212-486-443
                                    Albany office            518-431-4070
                                    Buffalo   "                 716-846-4111
                                    Binghamton             607-772-6792
                                    Hudson Valley          914-285-9741
                                    Long Island              631-753-0978
                                    Rochester                 585-263-5866
                                    Syracuse                  315-423-5471
                      
                                    Washington, DC Office 202-224-6542                                                       
                                    E-mail: senator@schumer.senate.gov
 
Sen. Hillary Clinton:    
                                    New York City office tel. 212-688-6262
                                    Westchester               914-725-9294
                                    Long Island                631-249-2825
                                    Buffalo                       716-854-9725
                                    Syracuse                    315-448-0470
                                    Rochester                   585-263-6250
                                    North Country             315-376-6118
                                    Washington, DC office tel. 202-224-4451
                                    E-mail: senator@clinton.senate.gov
 

Sen. Diane Feinstein:
                                    San Francisco office  415-393-0707
                                    Los Angeles               310-914-7300
                                    San Diego                  619-231-9712
                                    Fresno                        559-485-7430
                                    Washington, DC         202-224-3841 
 
The mailing address of all Senators is: United States Senate
                                                             Washington, DC 20510
 

Top of Page