MORE EUROPEAN MADNESS

by Scott Tips

Editor of Health Freedom News
Board Member and Legal Counsel for NHF

July 2005

The anti-supplement bias of the European Union (EU) became even more apparent when a recent working document drafted by the European Commission proposed that a European Directive be put in place to regulate enzymes.  This proposal is already supported by a number of European countries and is expected to be implemented by the end of this year.

Basically, the proposed Directive would require expensive dossiers of safety and technical information on each enzyme before it could be sold or consumed.  Insanely, this Directive would also require that before a food enzyme could appear on the Commission’s “positive list” (a list of enzymes that are approved), the company wanting to market the enzyme would also have to prove that there is a “technological need” for this enzyme that is not already met by other means!

Of course, its proponents argue that this is all a necessary part of the EU’s effort to harmonize its member States’ various laws.  But by using this argument, these people gloss over the real reason for this strict of a Directive being put in place:  To eliminate competition for the big pharmaceutical players.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to require enzymes to prove themselves safe prior to sale.  Enzymes are already well proven safe by their safe use over the millennia by humans and animals.  The Europeans should focus their attention instead on those products and service-providers that are already shown to be risky:  Prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, doctors, and toxic new chemicals brewed from a witches’ tub of who knows what.  Hundreds of thousands, even millions, have died from those causes; but how many can they show actually died from consuming enzymes, particularly natural ones?  Do we even need to give the answer to this question?

And the proof that this Directive is just another hatchet-job being performed by the Commission for its pharmaceutical paymasters is amply shown by the fact that an enzyme must demonstrate a so-called “technological need” that no one else is meeting before the enzyme can be approved for sale!  This is the same kind of moronic thinking that would have kept electricity off the streets and out of private homes because in 1900 there was ample gas lighting everywhere.

The EU economy is in bad-enough shape without straight-jacketing itself with this kind of nonsensical and anti-free-market thinking.  We wonder if it ever occurs to these bureaucrats when they are thinking up these hare-brained regulations the full extent to which they are severely harming and handicapping their economies – that is, putting real human beings out of work and impoverishing them.

The problem, though, is that the madness does not stop at European shores.  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), with stars in its eyes for anything and everything that its Euro-FDA cousins do, constantly tries to implement the same kind of rules and regulations that it enviously sees its European counterparts imposing.  Each tightening of the noose around consumers and manufacturers that takes place in Europe is just more grist for the mill in the United States and Canada.

That is why the National Health Federation has taken such an active interest in not only stopping the FDA’s congressional attack dogs from passing anti-health-freedom legislation but has projected itself forward internationally over the last decade or more and fought those insane rules and regulations that, in our increasingly international world, will also affect North America.