Big story from the New York Times late this evening that will ripple across political and health care landscapes... New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office has issued cease-and-desist letters to four huge retailers demanding they pull numerous herbal supplements from their New York shelves for falsely claiming their ingredients and benefits.
New York Attorney General Targets Supplements at Major Retailers
The four retailers are volume giants in the sale of herbal supplements (and just about everything else) - Walmart, Walgreens, Target and GNC. In some cases, the supplements advertised ingredients they did not contain at all, and in most other cases, they were comprised mostly of fillers of powdered vegetables including house plants, according to the Times.
I think it's best to let the story do the talking on the particulars, but I do want to highlight three paragraphs tucked into the middle of the piece that shine a very harsh light on senior Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. It is possible this could result in his political unraveling. And more broadly speaking, it reveals an easily understood relationship between our campaign finance system and legislative protection schemes at the highest levels of Congress.
Under a 1994 federal law, supplements are exempt from the F.D.A.’s strict approval process for prescription drugs, which requires reviews of a product’s safety and effectiveness before it goes to market.
The law’s sponsor and chief architect, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, is a steadfast supporter of supplements. He has accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the industry and repeatedly intervened in Washington to quash proposed legislation that would toughen the rules.
Mr. Hatch led a successful fight against a proposed amendment in 2012 that would have required supplement makers to register their products with the F.D.A. and provide details about their ingredients. Speaking on the floor of the Senate at the time, Mr. Hatch said the amendment was based on “a misguided presumption that the current regulatory framework for dietary supplements is flawed.”
Stay tuned... stay very, very tuned.