Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Just because Nancy Pelosi and company are doing their best to drag Zombie ObamaCare across the finish line doesn’t mean that there aren’t other bad ideas floating around Congress.

One bad idea that thankfully won’t be passing anytime soon was embodied in S. 3002, sponsored by none other than Sen. John McCain until he decided to withdraw it yesterday. It would have empowered the FDA to regulate food supplements, and regulating them would probably have meant banning some, and raising the prices of others in order to satisfy the FDA’s lengthy safety testing requirements.

This would have been a bad thing.

Make no mistake about it: There’s a whole lot of quackery in the health supplement business, with unprovable claims and inexplicable fads (shark cartilage, anyone?), and I’m sure that many health supplements (very possibly including some I take) do nothing more than make expensive urine. And like anything else, you can’t keep idiots from abusing them, which is why I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some dope has managed to give themselves heavy metal poisoning or destroy their kidneys. (Just like those super-geniuses who managed to turn themselves blue ingesting colloidal silver.)

But the purpose of government is not to protect people from themselves, it’s to protect people from others. And my fear is that the FDA might well have started banning supplements left and right so as to respond to pressure from politicians who receive big bucks from the pharmaceutical industry (especially given how cozy the Obama Administration got with them when crafting the backroom deals to buy off their support for ObamaCare). Or maybe just because the employees of supplement makers aren’t members of the SEIU.

In my lifetime, I’ve probably benefited the most from two wonder drugs. One was Claritin, which managed to relieve allergies so well (without making you groggy the way old anti-histamines would) that it was well worth paying the $3 a pill price it went for if you didn’t have insurance just before it was made over-the-counter. (Now it’s more like 5 cents a pill if you buy the generic version at Sam’s.)

The other one was Melatonin. Throughout my 20s, I suffered from moderate chronic insomnia. My brain simply would not shut off when I laid down to go to sleep. And traditional anti-histamines-based sleep aids left me feeling like my skull was stuffed with cotton the next morning. When I was young I could get away with it, but the older I got the tireder I got. Until I tried Melatonin.

The difference was like (ahem) night and day. I take a pill a couple of hours before going to bed, resulting in a full night of REM sleep and no grogginess in the morning.here don’t appear to be any significant negative side effects, and my guess is that tens of millions of Americans are taking it to get a good night’s sleep.

Which is why I was worried that S. 3002 would have lead to a ban on Melatonin, especially since it’s already banned for over-the-counter use in Europe and Canada. Has it looked like it was going to pass, the first thing I was going to do was stock-up on a lifetime supply of the stuff. But why should I have to?

McCain evidently received a boatload of mail opposing the bill from constituents, and decided to actually pay attention to their complaints. (Which puts him one up on Obama, Pelosi and Reid.) So score one for the forces of liberty this time around.