On Aug. 20, SENPA and Natural Products Marketer hosted a webinar titled “United for Change: The Impact and the Future of the Natural Products Industry.” The webinar, where longtime industry leaders recalled the extreme measures taken for the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), celebrated the 30th anniversary of the bill.
Passed in 1994, DSHEA is the federal law that defines and regulates dietary supplements. It considers supplements as a category of food.
“This act was intended to exempt dietary supplements from industry from most FDA drug regulations, but it also established standards for supplements and prohibited manufacturers from making false claims,” said Debra Short, executive director of SENPA.
The webinar was divided into two parts, a panel discussion with industry experts and a Q&A session with emerging leaders in the industry. During the Q&A session, the emerging leaders asked the panel about a range of topics including the future of DSHEA, the retail concerns of the current era and how to educate customers and communities.
Short said the webinar was aimed at resounding the history of the industry, particularly how retailers sent a message to consumers through the official Blackout Day campaign across the nation.
“The effort led to the second largest letter writing campaign that Congress ever experienced next to the Vietnam War,” Short said.
Peter Brodhead, owner of Brighter Day Natural Foods in Savannah, GA, said one of the biggest galvanizing moments for DSHEA was the FDA raid on Dr. Jonathan Wright’s clinic in Tacoma, WA because he was using “preservative free nutrients” from Germany for IV treatments.
Brodhead also had a second incident involving a popular thymic extract from Enzymatic Therapy. A local medical doctor used it and had “extremely good results” in helping with hepatitis B.
“It became very, very popular in our town and word got out nationally,” Brodhead said. “Well, the FDA just randomly went in and stopped Enzymatic Therapy from marketing that product, pulled it off the shelves, for no real reason that we knew of.”
According to Roy Upton, president of American Herbal Pharmacopeia and director of California-based Planetary Herbals (Threshold Enterprises), the original idea for the Blackout Day came from Daniel Gagnon of Herbs Etc. in Santa Fe, NM.
Gagnon “turned his store into a political action center” where he draped his shelves in black to let customers know that FDA might remove products from the shelves.
The campaign went national. “So, for the next year we wrote petitions, political action letters on how they could make their retail store a political action center, how to contact their senators, their congresspeople, how to lobby locally, phone numbers to call,” Upton said. “We hand-fed every retailer and every natural health care practitioner almost in the country a script for how to defend their right to use the herbs and the nutrients that they used for their health care needs.”
Bruce Cohen, owner of Nutrition World in Palm Beach, FL, organized a campaign to meet with congresspeople in Florida and push them to co-sponsor DSHEA. He also organized a Blackout at his stores, bringing in coffins and hearses from local funeral homes.
The reaction was amazing, said Cohen. “When you spoke to a congressman or their aides, they knew all about this by the time we got to them,” he said. “It was just getting them on board as co-sponsors of the bill. They told us they’ve never seen anything like what our industry was doing. It was scary, but it was a great time.”
Cheryl Hughes, owner of The Whole Wheatery in Lancaster, CA, was also actively involved with the campaign, particularly through lobbying efforts and talking with local schools and newspapers.
“People thought that your voice didn’t matter, but we proved them all wrong by telling them how important it was to matter,” Hughes said.
Short added, “What it did is it brought awareness for our customers, our community to understand that we were fighting for their freedom to be able to purchase product in our store. We built that integrity with our community.”
Upton recalled the activists overloading congressional fax machines. “The faxes were actually one of the most successful parts of the campaign for the simple reason that congressional staff were receiving so many faxes through their machines that they couldn’t do anything else in their office,” Upton said. “So right now if we do an email blast, they’re not going to read a single word, but when they’re getting faxes and their fax machine is running out of paper and they need to hire temps to open up the letters, that’s a big part of what made this successful.”
To view the full webinar, visit www.senpa.org.
