Dietary Supplements and Alternative Health "Think globally. Act locally." goes the old grassroots activist adage. But we may have a situation where acting locally AND globally will be needed to produce results. In recent e-Alerts I told you about the European Union (EU) Directive on Dietary Supplements that will reclassify vitamin supplements as medical drugs, mandate low dosage levels, and outlaw many supplement ingredients that are currently widely available. In the e-Alert "Twilight's Last Gleaming?" (7/13/04), I suggested that HSI members in the U.S. write their congressmen and let them know that we don't need international organizations to "protect" us from our personal health care choices. But there's more you can do, wherever you live. Responding to this issue, an HSI member named Isobel who lives in the UK posted this message on the HSI Forum: "This is not just a European issue, it is a worldwide issue. Consumers, practitioners, innovative manufacturers, distributors and anyone who takes quality supplements need to firstly familiarise themselves with all the information on www.alliance-natural-health.org (Alliance for Natural Health) and then they need to join as Members (free) or better still donate on the web and become a Partner. They then need to tell as many others as they can about what is going on here - PLEASE before it is too late." You can clearly sense the desperation in Isobel's message. And I don't blame her. I'd be feeling the same if I lived in a EU country right now. But if this threat to dietary supplements and alternative health care isn't stopped in the European Union, we can expect the initiatives of the Codex Alimentarius Commission and other international organizations to apply their restrictive regulations in the U.S. and elsewhere. The officials of these organizations are thinking globally and acting globally. They have patience, unlimited funding, and political power on their side. But like Goliath, they assume there's no way they can lose. Time for David to step up. | 
