Alternative medicine practitioners and marketers in the United Kingdom have been bracing for this for a while.
The Belgian bureaucrats are putting the clamp down on sales of herbal products across the board.
Herbalists, Chinese medicine practitioners and supplement sellers will now have to obtain a “license” for each herb they sell. All this loveliness starts on May 1st.
And the cost?
A mere 100,000 pounds for each herbal component. Of course, this is going to spur a massive black market of unsafe product.
Marketers and writers in the States complain about compliance copy — seems like we’ve got it easy.
Here’s an article on this from The Independent last week.
The products are already made in a defacto black market, with no testing, oversight or quality assurance (governmental or industry-led) – not to mention no testing to work out safe dosages, side effects, contraindications or indeed whether the product does anything at all. All that’s changing is now is we’re calling these products what they are – snake oil.
Which products exactly are snake oil, Nate?
Echinacea…elderberry…maybe aloe for that matter? Perhaps, everything that doesn’t hail from Fortune 5 drug company.
At any rate, a merchant that’s sold these in the past will need to pony up 100,000 quid for a license to continue selling them in the UK.
Maybe you feel safer popping pills from a “respectable” source like Glaxo Smith Kline. Of course, your heart medication might have some anti-depressants mixed in with them, but hey, they’ve done testing.
I’ll take my chances with elderberry, thanks.
@admin:
Well said my friend, its amazing how much trust people put in a product as long as it comes from a big corporation, people eat all sorts of weird man-manipulated chemicals and preservatives they have never heard of before or understand in any such way, but they will munch such chemicals down all day long with the false notion of safety purveyed by having brand name printed on the packaging, Nathan unfortunately sounds a lot like one of these brainwashed sheep :/
Sadly Lawrence,
The more time goes by, the more one sees the invisible hand of a virtual Police State arriving here by stealth in the UK. And who are our new masters? Our kind, unelected overlords in Brussels of course.
Soon we won’t even be able to buy green tea here without a Big Pharma prescription. Even then it’ll likely be laced with genetic ‘enhancements’ secretly designed to control ‘unruly’ population mood swings no doubt.
Don’t get me started!
Thanks again.
Ollie
Hi Ollie, you got it. The benevolent Belgian overlords.
Sorry, I think I already got you started.
Thanks, Tom. Well said, yourself — the willing lambs being led to the chopping block. As long as it’s got a label on it, it’s gotta be good.