John McCain Flip Flops With Your Safety

Image by Keith Allison via Flickr

John McCain loves to go after baseball players like Alex Rodriguez when it comes to steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. But Mr. Maverick has once again buckled under pressure from the real distributors of illegal substances—the nation’s supplement makers.

McCain, the self appoint champion of cleaning up sports, introduced a bill just last month that would have required supplement makers to take the outrageous step of telling consumers the contents of their products. Most Americans think the supplements they buy at their local health food stores have all been approved by the FDA and are therefore safe. Nothing could be further from the truth—the FDA has almost no authority over supplements whatsoever.

That’s because of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education bill that McCain and every other Senator passed and President Bill Clinton signed in 1994. The bill re-classified supplements as food, meaning supplement makers no longer needed to prove their products safe before taking them to market. Nor did they have to list the ingredients. Hell, they didn’t even have to report adverse effects—little things like liver failure, heart attacks, and deaths—attributed to their products.

The result of DSHEA was to allow unscrupulous supplement makers to stuff their products full of steroids, amphetamines, and illicit street drugs, much like the tobacco industry used nicotine to sell their cigarettes. Not to paint with too broad a brush—there are plenty of supplement makers selling products that are good for you—but all four professional leagues ban dozens and dozen of supplements sold everyday because they contain illegal and banned substances. McCain will surely jump back on stage and demand change if it turns out that A-Rod was getting human growth hormone from a Canadian doctor to the stars. But he just left the door open to supplement makers to peddle steroids and other harmful substances to you and your kids when he pulled support for the very bill he co-sponsored.

Andro was left on the market for six years after Mark McGwire made it famous before the FDA was finally able to reclassify it as an anabolic steroid. Worse was the use of ephedra, the weight loss supplement that took the FDA more than a decade to pull off the shelves despite multiple deaths linked to its use. Sports fans will remember Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, who collapsed and died of heat stroke following a workout in 2003, a death linked to the players use of ephredra.

But another result of DSHEA trumps the safety of American citizens: Money. And lots of it. Since  DSHEA was passed in 1994, the supplement industry has grown from a nice, safe $700 million business into a $23 billion-a-year monster.

Yes, money talks. Which brings us to Orrin Hatch. It was Hatch who rammed through DSHEA in 1994, threatening to hold up a few Clinton judicial appointees if his bill didn’t pass. Guess where the majority of the nation’s supplement makers are located? Right, Hatch’s home state of Utah. Who receives the most campaign contributions from the supplement industry? Hatch. Who wrote a letter to McCain asking him to withdraw legislation McCain himself proposed a month ago. Hatch.

McCain and Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.) introduced the Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010 on Feb. 2. The bill would have required supplement makers to register with the FDA, put information about ingredients on labels, and allow the FDA to pull unsafe products from the market.

“All Americans should know the exact ingredients of any dietary supplement they use and the FDA must have the tools necessary to ensure the safety of dietary supplements,” McCain said on the Senate floor the day he introduced the bill.

It didn’t take Hatch much time to twist his old friend’s arm. This is the same friend who in 2004 told Peter Keating of  ESPN that “It’s incomprehensible to me that we would not have a provision that would require them to report adverse reactions.”

Wrote Keating:

McCain voted for DSHEA, the 1994 law that gutted the federal government’s authority to oversee supplements—and that triggered the explosive growth in the sale of everything from horny goat weed to bee feces. But he says: “I’m not satisfied at all. The bill I voted for, frankly, I was not as aware of it as I should have been.”

Now McCain would like to force makers of supplements or any substance that affects the human body to test their products before bringing them to market. Given that the supplement manufacturers have huge political influence in Congress—they can mobilize millions of loyal customers, and they have a powerful patron in Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah —that’s not likely to happen.

Keating went on to predict that McCain and Durbin would be able to at least require supplement makers to report adverse effects of their products. But that idea, and the rest of the needed reforms, died Monday when McCain pulled the rug out from under his own bill. The announcement came not on the floor of the Senate, but on McCain’s twitter account. McCain did not make himself available to reporters who were curious about McCain’s sudden flip flop.

“It looks like it will be an easier world to be in the dietary supplement business,” Wall Street analyst Bret Jordan told the Wall Street Journal Monday. “The bill would have significantly tightened regulatory requirements.”

McCain’s bill was supported by every major professional league, whose players are often tripped up on drug tests by supplements tainted with steroids. This is one the reasons unions have objected to drug testing; the baseball union has pushed especially hard for the regulation of the supplement industry. McCain’s bill was also supported by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the United State Anti-Doping Agency. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly said the FDA needs to get a better handle on the dietary supplement industry, noting that the agency often has no idea where the supplement makers are located or what’s in the products they put on the market. And these are companies that aggressively target young males, especially teen age boys.

But don’t tell that to John McCain. He’d much rather lecture commissioners and union leaders about letting down the youth of America instead of keeping those very same kids safe.