OPINION
Gary Moller
I made this video nine months ago, which is as relevant as ever. Just one thing: We thought the fine for making unapproved health claims was to be $50,000. I was wrong. It is $200,000 or five years in jail – This is not punitive law: this is a kill shot.
Yes. Under this law, if an “impermissible” health benefit claim is made about a natural health product by an individual, they could be liable for a $200,000 fine or five years in prison. This is regardless of whether or not there is research evidence to support the claim: If the regulator does not approve it, including the dose and the way it is administered, then any such claims are illegal.
Am I prepared to risk jail if, for example, if I claim turmeric has health claims unapproved by the regulator, such as reducing lifetime cancer risk? No – not me! I’ll quit and retire rather than risk imprisonment or financial ruin.
Health professionals who practice natural health are being corralled, and then they face extermination by the government. They are working for Big Pharma, Big Food and Big Medicine – not you.
I’m not kidding – this bill is serious stuff! They are coming for your food – and our livelihood.
Natural health practitioners are on the endangered species list
I’ve been in the health business, beginning as a student in 1972 and still going strong in my 70th year. That’s longer than most in professional practice (or still alive!). I’m the two times masters’ mountain-bike world champion and ranked second in cyclocross, so I must be doing something right.
My partner, Alofa, has to be the healthiest ‘older’ Pacifica woman you’ll ever encounter. So, I can confidently say we know what we are doing and probably better than anyone else. Yet, now, they will appoint a ‘regulator’ to tell us how to do our job, and if we don’t comply, they’ll ruin us financially and throw us in prison! How outrageous can things get? Leave us alone and let us get on with helping people stay healthy, fit and out of the hospital. (While I have been typing this, the ambulances have been constant, wailing their way to Wellington Hospital.)
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
We know what we are doing and have done so for a very long time. So, what is the problem? There ain’t none. The consequence of what we do for a living is people are healthier, are no longer burdens on the health system and have no need for pharmaceuticals! Nobody dies from eating good food or taking a vitamin pill.
Preventive health will become a luxury for the wealthy
This bill is aimed at supporting big businesses, those who have multiple products on the market and a big turnover. Natural Health Practitioners and small business owners will be collateral damage. Any costs incurred by these businesses will have to be passed on to the consumer.
Barbara Roberts
We need your help, folks, and we were hoping you could ACT NOW by making an objection to the Therapeutic Products Bill! It’ll take only a few minutes because we are here to help you get it done.
Following three years of pandemic control, governments are not stopping there. Here in New Zealand, the government has introduced the “Therapeutic Products Bill” which will control how products which appear to benefit health are manufactured, prescribed, imported, advertised, supplied and exported. According to Health Minister Andrew Little: “It will enable New Zealand to take advantage of advances in medicine, such as cell and tissue therapies, emerging gene therapies and the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning software. Risk-proportionate approval systems will improve access to necessary and life-saving medicines, such as vaccines in a pandemic.”
Dr Guy Hatchard
When you read what Andrew Little said in the quote above: It is all about biotic AI and gene therapy – the modern-day gold rush, the Klondike of the New Century.
We are being progressively shoved more and more into the Big Food, Big Medicine, Biotech and Big Pharma camps. No more natural or plant-based medicine; only GE food, mRNA drugs and microchips in our brains.
Speak up and ACT now!
- Go to this link to object to this bill, and do so before February 15th.
- Challenge the government and individual MPs to give hard evidence that health and safety problems justify such open-ended, wide-ranging, costly and punitive laws.
- Write to MPs and complain that the appointment of a regulator amounts to an open-ended blank cheque to control the use of products used by more than 50 per cent of our population without fully specifying the principles he should use.
- Tell MPs that this legislation will be the last straw, which, if it passes, they will not just lose your two votes at the coming election, but you will also actively campaign against their re-election.
- It is preferable, as well, to make an appointment to meet your MP at their electorate office, so you can tell them what you think face-to-face.
- Get onto politicians’ social media – FaceBook, Twitter and so on – and tell them what you think.
Do not submit to anyone: Object, challenge and reject, but never submit to evil.
To help you write your objection in your own words, here is some material to inspire you and save you time. Refer, as well, to the more detailed explanation of the implications of this bill, by a health professional Barbara Roberts and her helpers. You can find her work at the bottom of this article and a link to her Facebook page.
PLEASE write an objection and rejection – https://www.parliament.nz/…/therapeutic-products-bill
Here is an example of a simple submission by one of my supporters:
- My/our comments I shall keep this brief for the sake of clarity. The proposed therapeutics bill is spurious and ridiculous. I would be most appreciative if examples were to be presented illustrating harms done by the benign, safe and helpful list, not to mention culinarily indispensable herbs this bill proposes to restrict. No government anywhere has the right to deprive anyone of these remedies/condiments provided free by nature and used freely for thousands of years. The agenda is patently nefarious and intended to propagate the use of pharmaceuticals for ALL health matters and, as such, is intolerable and unacceptable. The ramifications for food preparation, too, would be massively impacted. In short, the proposed bill is ridiculously conceived and intolerable!
- My/our recommendations That the proposed bill be scrapped in its entirety forthwith!
You can make your objection along these lines from Dr Guy Hatchard, in your own words:
More than 50 per cent of the New Zealand public uses natural products. The structure of the proposed bill is very concerning. It establishes a regulator who will be empowered to make decisions and control availability. It does not adequately specify what factors should influence his decisions. In other words, it is an enabling bill favoured by repressive regimes. The 2016 Natural Products Bill planned by Labour pre-2008 was eventually abandoned after careful consideration of its impact. As was the case then, I don’t see any evidence that the public is being disadvantaged under current regulations, nor is there any evidence natural products are harming them. This is another area where the government does not need to tighten regulations. The bill will place additional financial burdens on manufacturers and end users and introduce uncertainty about products that have been sold and relied upon by millions of New Zealanders. I think it is an underhand move to structure the bill as regulation without specifying content. This is designed to disperse and deflect public interest, especially as the public consultation period spans the summer break.
The very long list of common herbals planned to be banned under the 2016 bill drawn up by Medsafe with the help of ICMRA is still in existence. Some of these are even used regularly and traditionally in cooking. Under the bill, there is nothing to stop the new regulator from simply adopting this list as soon as appointed. This list would disrupt the availability of traditional remedies.
It is of note that Indian traditional medicine Ayurveda would be particularly affected. Something of concern to a large segment of our population and the Indian government.
People: We are being bombarded by this government, left, right and centre, and it can seem overwhelming, but be encouraged that cracks are appearing in the dam, and it may be about to burst. The resignation today of our Great Leader, also known as the kind Mother of our Nation, is the encouragement we need to keep pushing back against what I think is not only stupid but also evil. People are waking up to the deceit and harm these politicians have wreaked upon Godzone and realising they are not working for us but for interests beyond our borders. So, please take heart and keep chipping away.
Be strong and do not falter: We occupy the moral high ground; therefore, you are on the winning team, but only if you act promptly and do so with resolve!
We defeated this kind of legislation on two previous occasions, so let’s stick it to them by defeating them a third time!
Gary and Alofa
Here is an analysis of the Bill by Barbara Roberts, Homeopath
Therapeutics Products Bill
At the end of 2022, this bill was introduced to Parliament and had its first reading. It is not the first time that there has been proposed legislation for Natural Health Products, and the current legislation it proposed to replace – the Medicines Act and the Dietary Supplements Regulations – arguably need updating. But there are a large number of areas that are problematic for users and practitioners of a wide range of complementary health modalities. Even medicines and medical devices will be impacted, and costs will increase particularly for medical devices, even if you are just replacing parts.
If you use homeopathy, herbs or supplements and want to continue to have the freedom of choice for modalities and practitioners and the choice of herbs, supplements and remedies, if you want to be able to support micro and small businesses and individual practitioners then PLEASE read this post, or the bill itself and make a submission. You can just pick out one thing that resonates with you, and the write something in your own words about what it would mean for you, why you are concerned. There are no spelling or grammar checks and it is not marked, but your individual voice is important.
The bill is huge, and it is incorporating the Medicines Act, with Medicines, Medical devices and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, as well as Natural Health Products (NHPs).
Let’s start at the beginning –
Clause 30 defines what NHP ingredients are. As a homeopath this does not directly impact my practice, but if you use locally sourced herbal products grown from a micro business, this clause defines them as a NHP, which has implications further on in the bill. It includes plant and non-human animal extracts, vitamins, minerals, amino acids and ingredients to formulate these. Under this clause, placenta capsules, made from your own placenta after birth would not be possible.
Clause 31 is a biggie for homeopathy. It is about low concentration NHPs which includes homeopathic products and tissue salts. Homeobotanicals and flower essences would fall under clauses 29-30 as they are not dilute enough to be considered low concentration. The biggest issue here is 31 (1) (c) and (d), which say that a low concentration NHP cannot contain anything of human origin or from an animal covered in the rules (sheep and cows).
This will make our Matridonal remedies – Lac Humanum, Lac Maternum, Vernix, Amniotic Fluid and Placenta Humanum unavailable. It will mean that we cannot use our old nosodes – Tuberculinum Bov which is from cattle, and any nosodes that are made from diseased human tissue, or discharges, like Carcinosin, or Psorinum, would not be available either. These are such important remedies that make up a large part of my practice and are so effective. They are remedies that can be used for recurring illnesses, for inherited predispositions to disease (miasmatic influences) and when other indicated remedies are not working as well as they should.
If you are writing about this clause in the submission then ask [that] all homeopathic remedies or low concentration NHPs with a concentration less than 1×10*23 are exempt because there is no risk of disease from them.
Clause 69 makes manufacturing, or exporting NHPs and importing a low concentration NHP a controlled activity – that is prohibited unless allowed by license. You want to send some kawakawa balm to your cousin in Australia? Nope, can’t happen as that would be exporting an NHP.
Clause 71 there will be no injection or parenteral infusion of NHPs – this means no IV Vitamin C. It also means no IM Vitamin B12 which is a standard treatment and no iron infusions, so will be a disaster for conventional medical treatment also.
Clause 86 allows Health Practitioners (ones under the Health Practitioner Competency Assurance Act, so doctors, nurses, pharmacists, chiropractors) to dispense medicines for their own clients, or at the request of another practitioner. They can also compound medicines. (Pharmacists get their own section, they can also dispense prescriptions and sell pharmacist only, pharmacy only and general sales medicines).
However Natural Health Practitioners do not get the same thing. Under clause 112 we can manufacture for a client that we have had a consultation with. We can’t sell wholesale to other practitioners, we have to have a consult with the person we are selling to, and we cannot send an NHP overseas to a client if they are not normally resident in New Zealand. If you have a homeopath in one town and you live somewhere else and want to collect your prescription from a local homeopath so you can get it faster – you can’t. I have a few clients overseas. If they can’t source a remedy in their country I post it to them – but under this law I will be unable to do that. Those small businesses selling herbal tinctures will not be able to do so unless they have a consultation with each sale, and they cannot supply wholesale to a shop.
Clause 252 is scary for me – if an impermissible health benefit claim is made about an NHP by an individual they could be liable for a $200,000 fine or 5 years in prison. This may make many small businesses unable to talk about what sorts of things their herbal tinctures or aromatherapy ointments could be used as this is making a claim and the fines are out of proportion to income for these micro businesses. Could my posts be construed as making claims – possibly. One homeopath commented that it is not safe to talk about remedies, and this clause will make that a reality.
Clause 330 is about the regulator – one person to oversee every medicine, medical device, active pharmaceutical ingredient and natural health product in New Zealand. This is huge, and so broad that it would be impossible to have enough knowledge to do the role justice. In my opinion this is a job for a medicines and medical devices regulator, and a separate role for NHPs.
Clause 346 is also problematic, that they can take the decision of an overseas entity and use this for New Zealand. Do we want to allow the regulator to do this? Australia has already been shown to be biased against homeopathy with their fraudulent NHMRC review, and the FDA has also come out with a policy (not a law) which is anti-homeopathy. With this clause we open the door to losing sovereignty, with the regulator able to adopt and follow agendas from overseas. This is also risky for our rongoa Maori and Treaty of Waitangi obligations as no other country has any understanding of Te Ao Maori.
Following on is clause 347 about advisory committees. This should be strengthened, as in this bill while they advise the regulator it is not binding, so comes back to the regulator and their knowledge and biases. Also, the regulator needs to be “satisfied [members of the committee] have knowledge, skills, and experience” relevant to the issue. This is not satisfactory – it should be qualifications in the appropriate medical or NHP discipline, AND experience in New Zealand. I am not qualified to assess traditional Chinese medicine supplements, and so I should not be involved in making decisions about them. Likewise, the people who should be making decisions about homeopathic products are qualified homeopaths themselves: those who have completed a diploma or degree in homeopathy, not just done a short course.
This bill is aimed at big businesses, those who have multiple products on the market and a big turnover. Natural Health Practitioners and small business owners will be collateral damage. Any costs incurred by these businesses will have to be passed on to the consumer. There is already a wide range of cost for different supplements, some practitioner-only ones costing dollars every day. That will only increase with this bill, making preventative health a luxury.
If you have read this far, thank you. PLEASE write a submission – https://www.parliament.nz/…/therapeutic-products-bill
Say whether you support or oppose the bill (I will be opposing the bill) and then write about what the issues are for you with this bill.
I hope if we get enough support they will see the error of their ways and we can stop this bill before it becomes law.
Credit to Sonia Pechner for organising the group and also Lora Hagemann, Mike Dong, Angela Hair, Sarah Penrose and Jem Moon who came together last week so we could discuss these issues.
Further Reading:
- https://www.garymoller.com/post/natural-health-products-more-government-overreach
- https://www.garymoller.com/post/2016/09/30/natural-health-products-are-under-threat
- https://www.garymoller.com/post/2016/08/24/why-dodgy-synthetics-are-classified-as-safe-natural-health-products-by-medsafe
- https://www.garymoller.com/post/would-you-believe-it-they-are-at-it-again