A decades-old federal law needs updating.
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Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway just notched a win for everybody: Kansas City’s American Shaman will quit selling and advertising kratom in the state.
That’s great news, as anyone who’s gotten addicted to the powerful drug, and especially its derivative 7-hydroxymitragynine or 7-OH, can tell you. My colleague David Hudnall has taken a deep (and award-winning) dive into how this dangerous opioid — much more powerful than morphine — has been pushed on the American public before regulatory authorities were able to wrap their arms around it.
This isn’t a new story. The upper-classmen in high school told us about buying MDMA, aka ecstasy or molly, right from the bar at an all-ages club at the corner of 36th and Broadway in the mid-1980s. When I was in college in Kirksville, Missouri, later that decade, I had friends who regularly made the short drive to Iowa for the over-the-counter codeine fairly readily available there.
But those substances are about altering your mind. I’m much more worried about the almost-uncountable pills, powders and tinctures sold in the spirit of improving our overall health — but whose efficacy and basic safety are questionable at best.
I’m talking about the still-Wild-West world of so-called “dietary supplements.” According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it’s a $60 billion-plus business manufacturing as many as 100,000 products. About 75% of Americans take at least one regularly.
Mushroom powders, flower ointments
A few weeks ago, I went into a health and wellness store in a strip mall near my house in search of a tennis elbow brace. Not 30 seconds after walking through the door, an earnest salesman in his early 20s offered me unsolicited medical advice.
Did I have brain fog? This lion’s mane mushroom powder is sure to help. Allergies bothering me? Xylitol nasal spray is the answer. Sore knee? Rub arnica flower ointment on it before bed.
We can figure out if these pills and potions work — the scientific method is self-correcting and undefeated. A series of properly controlled, peer-reviewed studies can make it clear which substances are effective, and which ones do nothing — or worse, can hurt you.
Problem is, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s hands are somewhat tied. The landmark Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 classified “dietary supplements” as foods, not drugs — meaning the agency does not approve these products or their labeling before they’re brought to market. Its regulatory powers are hobbled.
That means supplement companies largely self-regulate the development of what they sell. In other words, good luck, consumers.
Most of the things you buy in the health aisles won’t harm you, at least at the recommended doses — manufacturers have no interest in going to prison for negligent homicide, after all. And many of those tablets and creams are innately harmless: If you consume too many water-soluble vitamins, for example, your body simply flushes them. Far riskier are fat-soluble compounds, which can easily become toxic at doses higher than the recommended daily allowances — and those guidelines weren’t pulled out of thin air.
Yes — you can overdose on grocery store vitamin pills.
Podcast pill pushers
This is a well-known issue. “Nine in 10 health food stores suggest dietary supplements for treating a variety of illnesses, from hypertension to cancer,” advised an article in the American Journal of Public health a little over a decade ago. That was before the world of podcasts blew up.
If you’re not a listener, you aren’t familiar with the oddly insular world of podcast commercials. On the left, expect lots of ads for online psychotherapy and home-delivered meal kits. And if you tune into shows from the right, you’ll hear pitches for cryptocurrency, survivalist supplies — and supplements. Lots and lots of supplements.
The supplements game is central to many conservative-leaning alternative media figures’ empires. Leading podcaster Joe Rogan — an extremely influential figure among young men, and whose 2024 endorsement is widely credited for helping put Donald Trump back in the White House — might be the modern king of supplements. He endorses numerous offerings from Onnit Labs Inc., a company he co-founded to sell products promising better sleep, athletic recovery and brain function — and one that’s been sued for alleged deceptive advertising. Rogan is a vocal proponent of taking high doses of fat-soluble vitamins D and K, along with colloidal minerals, which can be particularly hazardous.
He’s far from the only one, with Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Fox News host-turned-U.S. Israeli ambassador Mike Huckabee peddling everything from self-admittedly addictive nicotine pouches to sleep aids (and variously getting into legal trouble for it).
Medical conspiracist at head of HHS
Reams have been written about how hucksters take advantage of people desperate for answers when medical science can’t help them. I have zero desire to pile on, or suggest victims are gullible when they’re actually at the end of their rope. And having Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime medical woo-woo conspiracist, at the helm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sure isn’t taming the medical misinformation fires.
But, please: Can’t our serious leaders in Washington revisit that 30-plus-year-old law hamstringing the FDA and bring it into the internet age? The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions has wide authority over drugs sold in this country. Its members include Missouri’s Josh Hawley and Kansas’ Roger Marshall, himself a physician. Why not flex their oversight muscles and protect their constituents from unscrupulous hawkers of substances that sometimes do little — and too often, do worse?
Then again, Sen. Marshall defended — no, championed — Trump’s way-off-label use of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 preventative. That tried and true anti-malaria med was all the rage online in 2020 as a magic bullet during the pandemic, along with horse dewormer ivermectin. Despite the fact that neither has cured a single person of the coronavirus.
The power of commerce, coupled with the social networks’ refusal to tamp down blatantly false information under the guise of “free speech,” is the real poison pill. And if our elected officials who have the most reliable facts at their disposal won’t take a stand to protect us, maybe we really are all on our own.
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Derek Donovan is a member of The Kansas City Star’s editorial board and deputy opinion editor. He writes editorials and columns, and edits guest commentaries and letters to the editor. He was previously The Star’s longtime public editor, and is the author of “Lest the Ages Forget: Kansas City’s Liberty Memorial.”