Hazardous to Health

5 January 2004


Ephedra Banned by FDA

The American belief that there is a pill for everything remains unshaken, but the Food and Drug Administration in Washington did a wise thing in banning ephedra, a dietary supplement that is used by supporters to increase energy, improve athletic performance and reduce the waistline. They seem undeterred by the fact that it also causes insomnia, tremors in the limbs and heart palpitations, to say nothing of death.

The Kensington Review is not in favor of banning any substance from consumption by informed adults making decisions without compulsion. The social costs in the war on drugs far exceed the damage that legalization would do. As much as tobacco use is a vile and disgusting habit, its toleration is necessary because it meets those criteria. In the case of ephedra (a/k/a/ Ma-Huang), the public is sadly uninformed.

The trouble arises from the rather foolish law Congress passed in 1994 that permitted dietary supplements to be treated as foods rather than as drugs. The regulatory systems are quite different, and the government does not subject foods to the same scientifically rigorous testing that it does for drugs. While not entirely accurate, the broad rule is that a drug has to prove itself safe and effective to be sold, while a food must be proved harmful to be banned.

Homeopathic medicine, or quackery to give it a more accurate name, starts from the premise that folk remedies have some basis in pharmacological science. And it is true that most of the modern drugs that save countless lives started as plant extracts. However, the FDA requires double blind tests, and establishes safe levels of dosage based on clinical studies. With folk medicine, evidence that it works is anecdotal at best, and concentrations and dosages are haphazard.

And so, ephedra is banned, some ten months after it contributed to the death of Steve Belcher, a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles. It is untested, it carried no warning label, there is no recommended dosage. Yet, it was sold as a "feel good get skinny" pill. The pill isn't the problem. The law that lets a pill be sold without any real information of scientific validity behind it is the problem. That's what happens when the market is a little too free.

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