Forming a United Herbal Industry
Ingredient Purity
To confront botanical adulteration, Dr. Daniel Fabricant, CEO, Natural Products Association (NPA), suggested suppliers and manufacturers pay close attention to the Food Safety and Modernization Act and the burden it’s going to bring on the suppliers. “It’s incredibly important and something we’re working on at the NPA,” he said. The New York attorney general is an image problem; he said that ideally, he’d like to see it go away. “So how do we make it go away? What is it we need to do? Is it by FDA and testing products? Probably not. What else is there? Establish credibility. Fight on three fronts: the regulatory front, the legislation front on Capitol Hill, and as needed, the legal judiciary front.”
But the industry can do better, he added. “We’ve done a good job rallying people. We’ve probably upset the day in and day out operations of the AG (attorney genera) but we’d like to get it to the level that we upset it so much that they decide this is not the industry I want to take a look at because A: When they take a look at the federal statutes they’ll understand that and B: the fact that people care so much and believe in the industry so much they’re more than willing to write letters and emails to make it known to their congress person or senator, or attorney general in this case.
“By and large the best thing we can do as an industry is band together and send as many letters as possible to the AG. And let him know that this isn’t ok. You can’t cast this burden on a whole industry with incomplete data.”
