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Major Retailers Accused of Selling Fraudulent Herbal Supplements
MikeChino writes: The New York State Attorney General's Office is demanding that GNC, Walmart, Walgreens, and Target remove store brand herbal supplements from their shelves after the pills were found to be packed with a strange array of fraudulent—and in some cases hazardous—ingredients. Popular supplements such as ginseng, valerian root, and St. John's wort sold under store brand names at the four major retailers were found to contain powdered rice, asparagus, and even houseplants, while being completely void of any of the ingredients on the label.
Because the ones that list their actual ingredients are honest and factual?
What's the big deal? Instead of getting "Useless Compound X," buyers were getting "Useless Compound Y."
Note: Yes, I'm partially kidding. People are entitled to get the woo they've been promised, and I suppose there are allergy issues involved.
But of course it's perfectly ok to sell fraudule...err, homeopathic "remedies" which do not and cannot work any different than a placebo.
So sell them as homeopathic and charge even more (because they are more powerful, right!)
Every herbal supplement that is going to be ingested in America needs a COA (Certificate of Authenticity) to verify their legitimacy. Disclosure: I used to work in the herbal supplement industry. This is not wholly uncommon. The biggest issue here is that the suppliers/manufacturers were ripping off the GNC etc. Someone along the way faile dto check the authenticity, and they got burned.
As you say, it's irrelevant that the supplements don't work: what matters is the false advertizing. This is a legitimate consumer protection issue, unlilke all the nannying and moralizing I'm using to getting from the NY State Attroneys General.
I'm highly skeptical of store brands as a whole. They're much cheaper than the national brands, and claim to be the same thing. But, as they're "supplements", FDA doesn't check. We should just trust CVS, Walgreens, etc, to be telling the truth, right? I mean, they're huge, honest companies and they distribute real medicines, so you know they are taking great care to make sure the stuff they sell is as advertised. Let's do a sniff test on that statement. Nope. Doesn't pass. I suppose the store brands *could* be legit, and I could be getting a great deal -- exact same, high quality multivitamins for 1/4 the cost of the national brand. But my spidey sense says, no. Rice flour and rat droppings are far more likely, especially since the package gives no indication of where the product originates, just "Distributed by CVS". Yeah, that in itself inspires a whole lot of confidence...NOT.
500 mg or more of Cinnamon helps insulin sensitivity- close to what the diabetic drug Metformin does. However, a number of cinnamon pills are bogus- sawdust and cinnamon oil often times.
500 mg -1000mg of Niacin (nicotinic acid) raises HDL (even more effective when combined with large doses of fish oil).
Some supplements do work. It is bad enough to try and figure out which supplement contains the right form of Niacin, compared to figuring out if the supplement even contains the ingredients on the label.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
supplement company: check out our new herbal animal vegetable raw vegan youth potion penis elixer and life enhancer with guanaramalama and bilinko for supported function of your satrogenum B9
AG: this is nothing but brake dust, old chinese newspaper shreds, and windshield glass
supplement company: well its been on the market for 2 years and is completely safe.
AG: yeah but it doesnt do what it says and contains things it doesnt list. pull it.
supplement company: sure thing buddy! let me just step over this large mountain of cash I earned and ill get right to it. sure am sorry about the mixup.
Stores: oh we sure are super sorry too, turns out we got distracted by counting all this money.
Supplement company: who wants to sell this new supplement! its got enhanced vigorators and revitalomic green tea tomato lyzopramic dyloricackles to enhance your penis life
Stores: who are we do deny the customer!
AG: THIS IS JUST SHREDDED PHONEBOOKS AND CAFFEINE
supplement company: it iiiiiis? oh my worrrrd it happened again! goodness gracious.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I can't decide whether this says more about corporate greed or about the culture of alternative medicine, that these retailers can make such a flagrant mockery of herbal supplements, and apparently get away with it for quite a while.
Over-regulation is bad. Selling a bottle that is 100% not what it says on the label, is a reasonable expectation. Call it what you want - false advertising, fraud, etc. It's clearly something that shouldn't be permitted. I don't think you'd get much argument from either side of the isle.
Er, aisle.
Forgot this example: New York was the first state to enforce religious-based food laws - NOT that the state decided what was kosher, or halal, but the state enforced that if a store *claimed* to be kosher or halal then the store had to have a certificate from an appropriate religious agency confirming it. It's up to the customer to decide whether they trust that particular agency, but at least the customer has the appropriate information to make a decision. Truth in labeling.
But the Republican/Libertarian said regulation is bad!
Nope...That's NOT what they say.
The ones I hear talking about this say that government and regulation should be as SMALL as possible; that OVER REGULATION and large government is bad.
There is a MAJOR difference between what they actually say and what you claim they say.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The store-brand crap claims to contain an ingredient it doesn't contain. The homeopathic crap claims to not contain an ingredient it doesn't contain. It should be obvious how those are different.
Unless you're Orin Hatch
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
If some idiot wants to buy 20C whatever that's their business. It's only a problem if the what is in the bottle is actually something different or false claims are made about efficacy.
Homeopathic "remedies" are the very definition of false claims regarding efficacy.
I RTFA and the links and I didn't see any mention of the source manufacturor, but If I had to guess, I would guess they were made under contract in China and labelled with whichever distributor was buying today's production run.
US FDA/USDA-style regulatory enforcement and quality controls are practically non-existant in China. Just look at the great melamine scare a few years ago where they where bumping up the "protein" level of ingrediants by adding toxic melamine (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...).
All imports of food/drug or ingrediants from china should be banned out-right.
Scheduled: Drug. Not present in nature: Drug. Present in nature: Supplement. Synthesized drug which metabolizes into a natural substance present in the body (e.g. a wholly-unnatural compound which metabolizes into noradrenaline): Supplement.
So weed is not a scheduled Drug, it is a Supplement? Tell that one to the DEA
Substances are placed in their respective schedules based on whether they have a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, their relative abuse potential, and likelihood of causing dependence when abused.
Ill add that is also is determined by how many people in congress are using the drug. I believe that congresses use of Viagra is the only reason it is not a schedule 2 narcotic.
Uh, one of the tenets of the Libertarian platform is "No force or fraud." This is certainly fraud, and therefore a suitable target of government force.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You are confused, there are already regulations and they were broken in this case. The solution is there already in existing law.
Wrong. The true libertarians will argue that this is excessive government regulation, and that the government should stay out of commercial affairs like this, and that the "invisible hand of the holy free market" will correct these problems. So if someone wants to sell baby formula with melamine in it, libertarians think that should be perfectly legal and that bad word-of-mouth will put such companies out of business (after some babies die from it--oh well), and that the government should just keep its nose out of it.
This is precisely why libertarianism, in its pure form, is lunacy.
With Republicans, it really depends on how much libertarian kool-aid they've been drinking. Not all Republicans are that extreme. (I don't normally have much good to say about today's Republicans, but I'm not going to be untruthful about them either. They do mostly suck, the Teabaggers really suck, but to say they're all against all regulation is patently false, they're just generally very big-business-friendly and not very helpful to poorer or middle-class Americans.)
The ACTUAL problem, is that active compound content of herbs is HIGHLY variable.
One valarian rout of equal mass to another valarian root, will contain more (Or less) active compound than the other.
This means to have consisten product, EXTENSIVE, and CONTINUOUS product testing would have to be done to assure correct dosage for the proper treatment of a condition.
That's expensive, and creates liability for when the preparation does not meet the listed dosage of active compound.
It isn't that the compounds in the herbs are not effective-- it is that the efficacy of a certain measurement of herbal preparation cannot be consistently effective.
Synthetic preparations (Like a tylenol), are created under lab conditions. The quantity of active ingredient is tightly controlled, and dosage is easily metered. There are fewer ancilliary compounds in the preparation that can cause upset, and overall the preparations are safer, more reliable, and more potent.
I like Jerry Pournelle's approach -- You can sell snake oil pills, but if you advertise it as snake oil, it had better contain actual oil extracted from actual snakes.
While you are right that there are a lot of studies showing no effect or a negative effect from alt med drugs, there are also peer-reviewed and high-evidence studies showing that some of them do work and are effective.
My wife is a member of ASPEN, and so I get to read through a lot of their journals with her. In a paper on treatments for IBS, the "drug" that had the highest strength of evidence, and effect size was... peppermint oil. The research shows pretty conclusively that it is better than a lot of IBS-specific medicines that have come out in recent years, several of which got pulled from the market for being dangerous, and now can only be prescribed in limited situations.
Peppermint oil will never be a medicine, because you can buy it at the grocery store. But it *is* highly effective at treating a very serious disease.
My politics tend towards liberal/progressive for most issues, but I don't have a lot nice to say about Obama either; I think he's sold out to the banksters for one thing.
But yeah, a lot of nutty people on the right say absolutely insane things about him, that he's a communist Muslim and wants to declare martial law and become a dictator, shit like that. It's absolutely insane. Do people really believe that a President can just declare himself dictator and the military will go along with that? People on the left do it too about people on the right though, going on and on about how evil everyone in the Republican party is. The polarization and utter detachment from reality is mind-boggling.
Arguing about a bottle label? Now you're just trollin.'
Homeopathy is a system that claims to treat disease. A homeopathic preparation "made in the standard way" incorporates those claims, even if the FDA/equiv prohibits printing that claim on the bottle. This is because the preparation and method have been subjected to rigorous scientific and medical examination (for over two centuries) and found to be fake medicines before the fact.
Herbal supplements also claim to treat disease, and some of them have been found effective through scientific and medical examination. An herbal supplement (or any other medicine at all) that doesn't contain the specified substance is found to be a fake medicine after the fact.
I suppose the difference is "can't work" versus "doesn't work." Now if you're arguing that I ought to trust homeopathic preparations to actually be pure water when the entire system's basis has been utterly debunked.... that boils down to trusting a systemic liar to be consistent (and not to include harmful stuff). That's somehow better than finding incidents of lying (and possibly including harmful stuff) in a consistent supply chain? Really, really, no.
I think not...(*poof*)