Congress votes down Sen. Durbin’s anti-supplement amendment
by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer
(NaturalNews) A sneaky, eleventh-hour attempt by Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to essentially shut down the supplement industry alongside an amendment pertaining to prescription drug user fees has failed. In a vote of 77-20, the U.S. Senate voted to table Amendment No. 2127, which would have created “duplicative, unnecessary, and unexpected new regulations” for the supplement industry that could have resulted in many common supplements being pulled from store shelves.
To the surprise of the entire natural health community, the unveiling of Amdt. No 2127 came late Tuesday afternoon, according to the Natural Products Insider (NPI), just one day before the bill to which it was attached, S. 3187, the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act, was set for a vote. But because the natural health community immediately sprung into action to oppose Amdt. No 2127, it was successfully defeated.
“(Amdt. No 2127 is) based on the misguided presumption that the current regulatory framework for dietary supplements is flawed and that the FDA lacks authority to regulate these products,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Ut.) on the Senate Floor, in opposition to the amendment. He added that the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) already provisions the FDA with the tools it needs to properly regulate supplements, and that Amdt. No 2127 only “serves to punish all responsible companies with its overreaching mandates.”
Amdt. No 2127 would have unnecessarily required all manufacturers of dietary supplements to register them with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within 30 days, even though Title II of the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 already requires registration. This 30-day requirement, in other words, was designed to be impossible for supplement companies to comply with, which would have resulted in many of them simply being pulled from the market.
According to the U.S. Senate’s Legislation & Records voting page (http://www.senate.gov), the 20 U.S. Senators that voted against tabling this heinous attack on the supplement industry were:
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Cal.)
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.)
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.)
Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.)
Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.)
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.)
Sen. Claire McCaskil (D-Mo.)
Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt.)
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.)
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)
Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.)
Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nv.)
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)
Sen. John “Jack” Reed (D-R.I.)
Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.)
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
Sen. Bernard “Bernie” Sanders (I-Vt.)
Sen. John “Jay” Rockefeller (D-W.V.)
