Re: Good - The "Supplement" industry needs the FDA!

 It's totally unregulated and desparately needs it. Products are not monitored in any way for clean manufacturing processes, purity, potency, interactions with real medications and certainly not evaluated for efficacy in a scientific manner. A family friend is the CEO of a biotech firm developing new medications and I know FDA inspectors. The regulatory function of the FDA is not about money grabbing "Big Pharma", it's about product safety. Do you know how many MILLIONS of dollars of profit there is in the supplement industry? The companies are not burdened with the monumental expense of long term multi-phase trials of their products and the actual ingredients of most supplements are pennies per bottle! In the case of homeopathy, the cost of any active ingredient is negligible in a 200C dilution when you do the math on the dilution factor.

Your whole premise is wrong. Herbs are highly regulated. In fact in one way more than drugs. The FDA will ban drugs just on a suspicion of danger, but allow drugs known to kill people to remain on the market. Even when the safety studies of the drug were found to have been manipulated or hidden. For example look at ephedra. There was only ONE death directly linked to the herb ephedra. And that was an overdose when the kid took 8 times the recommended dose of a product. Yet the FDA tried blaming another 40 something deaths on ephedra when in fact many of the deaths were proven to have nothing to do with ephedra. One of the deaths was in a man that had taken a single dose of ephedra a week before his death. Even though the death was ruled to not have been from the ephedra the FDA still left his death as a statistic against the ephedra to justify their illegal ban. Many of the other deaths were attributed to the PHARMACEUTICAL DRUG ephedrine HCl, which is not the same thing as the herb ephedra. The FDA also went as far as to claim that the herb ephedra was being used to manufacture all the methamphetamine on the streets when in fact it was the pharmaceutical drugs ephedrine HCl and pseudoephedrine HCl, which the FDA gave exemptions to from the ban even though they are more concentrated and dangerous. In fact since the ban on the herb ephedra methamphetamine production has risen. So where are these drug manufacturers getting their base material? Oh that's right the FDA who is there to protect the financial interests of the drug companies lied about ephedra yet left an exemption for the real meth base so the drug companies could keep making a profit from the addictions and deaths of Americans including our children. Just goes to prove how unethical the FDA and the drug companies really are.

In fact if you want a real laugh look at the Congressional testimony concerning the banning of ephedra on the FDA's own website. In the testimony the FDA included in its list of adverse effects pregnancy and assault on a woman. Just goes to show how desperate the FDA was and to what lengths they would go to falsify information to obtain the ban on ephedra in order to protect the profits of the dangerous drugs being produced by the drug companies that ephedra competed with.

Then there is the FDA's illegal ban on both pau d' arco and organic germanium as "non-conforming food additives". Food additives are items added to food such as salad dressing. Pau d' arco and organic germanium, both of which have excellent safety records, are not added to food and therefore are not food additives. But the FDA cannot pull an herb or supplement from the market outright without proof of being unsafe. So instead the bypassed the law by falsely claiming these were food additives instead of supplements so they can seize shipments at their whim or use their illegal ban to harass store owners carrying these products.

On the other hand look at ibuprofen and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Unlike ephedra that was banned over one death ibuprofen KILLED 2 dozen people during clinical trials from ibuprofen induced hepatitis. Yet the FDA still approved this dangerous drug. Ibuprofen and other NSAIDs according to the FDA kill an estimated 16,500 people a year. And this does not take in to account unreported deaths due to the drug, deaths from the drug that are not linked and injuries including liver damage and kidney failure. Yet the FDA has not only allowed these deadly drugs to remain on the market, but has moved their status, as with so many other drugs once their patents expire, from a prescription needed status to an over the counter status. So tell us what magical transformation occurs to these drugs when their patents expire that make these dangerous drugs that required a prescription safe enough to be sold over the counter once that patent expires? And how is this "regulation" of the drug industry?

Also consider how long NSAIDs have been on the market, yet it was only a few years ago that they finally admitted these drugs increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. The FDA is not supposed to even approve drugs until these safety studies are completed and reviewed. And the increased risk of heart attack and stroke from these drugs was known all along. It  is simple common sense when you consider the fact that they constrict blood vessels for one thing reducing or cutting off the blood supply to the organs.  This is the same exact mechanism by which these drugs have been known to cause liver and kidney failure even when SINGLE RECOMMENDED DOSES are taken.  So how did this go unreported for over 30 years of these drugs sales? Did the drug companies deliberately hide this fact or did the FDA just look the other way as to not inhibit drug sales or both?

And let's look at some of the other FDA approved drugs:

-v1agra killed over 710 men at the last count I heard, which was years ago. Status: still on the market.

-DDI killed 160 people during clinical trials. Status: Approved by the FDA in a record 18 months under a new accelerated approval program.

-AZT is the primary cause of AIDS in the US, and may be responsible for countless hundreds of thousands of deaths. The largest study ever done on AZT found it SHORTENED the life of AIDS patients rather than extended their lives. Status: Still on the market even though the drug was originally banned for human use in the early 1960s when it came out as a chemotherapy agent since the drug was found to be so deadly.

-Most chemotherapy drugs have less than a 3% success rate, without factoring in things such as placebo effect and reoccurrence of secondary cancers. This makes most chemotherapy drugs, which are also known carcinogens, pure FDA approved quackery. Yet they are still in use with full FDA approval. In fact most patients undergoing chemotherapy die from the chemotherapy, not their cancer according to a training textbook I have on cancer written for doctors. But the deaths are falsely attributed to the cancer or something else other than the drug. This is a common method of manipulation used to make dangerous drugs appear safer than they really are.

In fact it was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association a while back that the drug companies were falsifying safety data on their chemotherapy drugs by dropping test subjects from the study results if they died or did not respond. This made th  drugs appear effective when in fact they were not. And the FDA still looks the other way.

A recent example was the approval of the drug Endostatin, derived from rat urine.  A program on NOVA followed two men undergoing Endostatin therapy as part of a clinical trial. The first man died so we know he was dropped, especially since the second man was dropped because as they said "his tumor grew beyond the parameters of our study". In layman's terms this means the drug failed to slow or halt the growth of the tumor so we had to drop him from the study so the failure will not skew our results to the negative. So despite the drug being found ineffective the drug still received FDA approval.

-Dextromethophan (DM) was supposed to be removed from the market by Court order in 1969 along with 709 other FDA approved prescription drugs found to be ineffective or too dangerous for human use. But the FDA found a loophole and allowed ALL of  these drugs to not only remain on the market, but then made many of these drugs available without a prescription. DM, which is still on the market to this day, was found to be no more effective than placebo. A fact confirmed by another study reported in the Journal of Pediatrics a few years ago.

And what about these FDA "inspectors"? Well as we can see they have not done their job unless their job is to protect the financial interests of the drug companies. Oh wait, that is their job. In fact former Commissioner for the FDA Herbert Ley testified to this fact before Congress. He stated that the FDA was governmental police powers to protect the financial interests of the FDA and in turn the FDA officials were receiving gifts from these companies and high level positions within these companies as rewards for this protection.

As a great example do you remember the generic drug scandal? The FDA was approving UNTESTED drugs in exchange for payoffs. When another dug company blew the whistle on the illegal activity the FDA used all of its power to come down on the drug company that blew the whistle while no FDA official or official from the pharmaceutical company involved in the scandal was ever charged with anything.

As for your claim about the millions of dollars spent on drug research this is misleading. Many of the drugs were initially tested by the NIH, with taxpayer dollars, then licensed to the pharmaceutical companies. And many others are nothing but slightly tweaked versions of the same drug they had already, but their patent expired. Nexium and Prilosec for example.

As far as I am concerned I think most FDA officials and heads of pharmaceutical companies should be charged criminally and locked up in prison for all their illegal acts and the deaths that have occurred from their hiding the safety issues of those dangerous and deadly pharmaceutical drugs!!!