Sneak Attack on Supplements, Slipped into Defense Bill—Stopped in Its Tracks!

Your messages to Capitol Hill accomplished this. But Sen. Durbin reportedly plans to reintroduce his usual anti-supplement bill soon.

Earlier this summer, we alerted you to the latest under-the-radar attack on supplements perpetrated by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and his allies. This time, they tried to attach their amendments, which would have limited supplement usage in the military, to a must-pass defense appropriations bill.

After a flood of thousands of messages to Capitol Hill, Durbin’s amendments were once again defeated! A hearty thanks to our dedicated grassroots activists, without whom victories like this would not be possible.

Unfortunately, our sources tell us that Durbin is still planning to reintroduce his Dietary Supplement Labeling Act. The bill was first introduced in 2011, and reintroduced in 2013. You can see our past coverage for the full story on this bad bill, but essentially it lays the foundation for an FDA pre-approval system for dietary supplements. That’s the way drugs are treated, but supplements—according to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act—are supposed to be regulated as food.

The bill would create extraneous red tape, paperwork, and burdensome labeling requirements despite the fact that just about everything the bill mandates other than pre-approval is already being accomplished under current law. All this bill would do is make it more expensive to manufacture supplements and dampen innovation. If fully implemented, the cost of supplements would soar, so that even fewer people could use them, and most would probably disappear from the shelves.

Let’s be clear: any move toward a pre-market approval system for supplements is a slippery slope that can be used by lawmakers like Durbin as a jumping-off point to regulate thousands of supplements out of existence. We believe this is precisely his intention, and that this is being done on behalf of the drug industry.

The Senate is in recess for the rest of August, but we will be closely monitoring Capitol Hill for any news regarding a reintroduction of the Dietary Supplement Labeling Act.

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