Pill Pushers in Public Policy

Health officials in Texas dealt a blow to consumer safety with their recent decision to suspend a law requiring warning labels on dietary supplements containing the powerful and sometimes dangerous stimulant ephedrine. The Texas regulation, which would have required ephedrine distributors to list a toll-free Food and Drug Administration number that consumers could call to report suspected side effects, was good public policy, for ephedrine is suspected of causing at least 80 deaths nationally and data about its safety are sorely lacking.

Texas officials decided to suspend the rule after Jeff Wentworth, a Republican member of the Texas Senate who also works as a lawyer for Metabolife, a major dietary supplement manufacturer, told Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson that the FDA would not be able to handle the flood of calls that the labeling would generate. Texas officials then received a call from a Thompson deputy who urged them, as they put it, to “delay either our implementation date or our enforcement of the rules.”

FDA officials say that contrary to Wentworth’s assertion, they are well prepared to accommodate calls from supplement users. Whether or not that’s so, Wentworth’s comments are outrageously inappropriate. A state legislator in the employ of a $16.8-billion-a-year industry has neither the knowledge nor the authority to tell the FDA what it is or is not capable of doing. What’s more, Wentworth, by arguing that labeling would generate a potentially unmanageable flood of calls, inadvertently makes a strong case for, not against, labeling.

Unfortunately, California hasn’t fared much better than Texas. Last year, California Gov. Gray Davis vetoed a measure similar to the one in Texas after taking $150,000 in contributions from Metabolife, and on Thursday--literally minutes after a dietary supplement industry lobbyist testified in opposition to a new incarnation of the measure--Assembly Appropriations Committee head Carole Migden hastily shelved the bill.

Davis had said he vetoed the measure because dietary supplements are “a matter of interstate commerce [that is] the responsibility of Congress to regulate.” Migden, a San Francisco Democrat, did not give a rationale for her decision.

One thing is clear, however: U.S. leaders, from Thompson to Migden and Davis, do not seem to have attended to scientists’ concerns about ephedrine as closely as they have to the industry’s concerns about regulation. The Texas and California regulations are sensible and quite modest compared with consumer protections in other nations (for example, Canada in June advised its people to avoid ephedrine ) and with the outright ban urged by medical experts like Dr. Sidney Wolfe of Public Citizen. All three political leaders should reconsider their decisions and back those consumer safeguards.