Jun. 4th, 2008

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Is there anything bad about it? The claims leveraged against it are

  1. It's evil.
  2. It will force 50%/70%/110% of all natural health products off the shelves (this, I am lead to believe, is perceived as a bad thing).
  3. It will make it illegal to give herbs you grow in your back yard to your own child.
  4. It will allow the government to pass laws with no democratic oversight or transparency (if true, this is bad; is it true?).
  5. It's a big plot by Big Pharma.
  6. It will allow government agents to eat babies.

The last item may be a pure fabrication. You get the idea, though; the spiel is pretty intense. From what I gather, however, the grassroots movement to stop the bill is rather heavily fertilised by the alternative medicine industry, and from where I am sitting, it looks like an attempt by Big Alternative Pharma to prevent legislation that would force them to play on a level field with the Ordinary Big Pharma, i.e. being subjected to tests to ensure that their medicines are, if not effective¹, then at the very least safe. Currently, I gather there isn't much testing even for this.

As you can tell, I'm not very much for Big Alt Pharma, and for Bill C-51 as I understand it, but I confess that I'm disinclined to read through 62 pages of bilingual legalese where half the sentences begin with Whereas and all the others contain at least one instance of the word shall. Is there anything to the protests, or is this just another case (like the lethally harmful US and UK anti-vaccination movements) of peddlers of superstition whipping their marks into a frenzy?

An even better metaphor may, in fact, be the parasitic wasp Glyptapanteles glyptapanteles—not content with feeding on their marks, these snake-oil peddlers con them into acting as protection against legal repercussions.

I'm interested in hearing if anyone has any reasoned, solid objections. Just don't forget—don't ever forget—that though Big Pharma may be run by corporate bastards, Alternative Pharma is Big, too², and the power of money corrupts even people who munch ginseng.


¹ NBC reports that although the CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) people do perform studies, they ignore them when they're negative.
² The same article describes dietary supplements alone as a $29 billion industry, and that's just in the US.

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Petter Häggholm

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