OPINION
On May 02, 2023, Dr Guy Hatchard gave the following speech at the Wellington Conference on the Therapeutic Products Bill.
Hello everyone, I am very grateful for the opportunity to speak to people who care about health. In every part of the world, traditional systems of medicine developed over time based on the healing properties of local plants. These traditions still exist today, many of them well documented and efficiently self-regulated. This is a vast resource of trusted safe and effective knowledge that the proposed Therapeutic Products Bill (TPB) will, without any doubt, mire in red tape as well as unnecessary and harmful restrictions.
Humans have had a co-evolutionary relationship with the natural world for millions of years. Plants are not just the source of our health, but in a very real sense the mothers of humankind. New research and understanding show it is not just the proteins, vitamins, fats, carbohydrates, co-factors of digestion, minerals, etc in our diet that constitute nutrition, but we also benefit from the intelligence or genetic structures in our environment and natural food sources.
Plants are healthy, period. The Therapeutic Products Bill requires that any product claiming to be healthy should be regulated by the government. In other words, the government is proposing to regulate the plant kingdom and much else. If you think about it, this is back to front, the plant kingdom is the one actually supporting our health and hence quietly regulating and supporting the government. It has done so throughout human history.
In the 18th century Linnaeus listed 13,000 species of plants, there are about 400,000 known today. Each species may have thousands of varieties: there are 30,000 roses for example. There are six million fungi. The idea that a regulator based in Wellington New Zealand will decide about their use and properties as envisioned by the TPB is patently absurd. An impossible Don Quixote enterprise that will absorb tens of millions of dollars of providers’ funds and be used to employ confused and uninformed people to dictate what we have for breakfast and what we choose to take when we are feeling off colour or if we want to improve health and prevent illness. This regulation will bankrupt small providers and leave the field open for offshore multinational corporations.
Paddy Fahy has told us Natural Health Products are used by 65 per cent of the population, a majority. An EU study authored by Juderon Associates estimates that NHPs are 45,000 times safer than pharmaceutical drugs, so why on earth are we seeking to regulate them?
The previous failed NZ efforts to regulate NHPs have been driven by the International Coalition of Medicines Regulatory Authorities ICMRA of which Medsafe is a member. This body sounds very official but is not in fact government sponsored or endorsed: it is largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry and exists in an unregulated global space. ICMRA produced the list of 5,000 approved and restricted substances adopted by the failed 2016 NHP bill. This list is likely to be adopted as the starting point of the present scheme.
Many natural plants are proposed to be banned, or could we say stolen, simply to create a monopoly for those who have synthesised approximate copies of their constituent alkaloids. A full 40 per cent of the drugs behind pharmacist’s counters in the Western world are derived from plants that people have used for centuries, including the top 20 best selling prescription drugs. In fact whole plants are more effective, and safer when taken as whole plants.
For example the 2016 bill outlawed senna, a key ingredient of Alpine Tea, a mild safe laxative, that Medsafe banned and removed from stores. Or Rauwolfia serpentina, which studies show reduces blood pressure safely. Rauwolfia is banned solely because a pharmaceutical company based a drug on its constituents. The 2016 bill proposed restrictions on common plants like cinnamon, castor oil, etc. It was a long and stupid list.
Behind this list are efforts to gain monopolistic control over not just NHPs, but also foods. The replacement of natural healthy foods with the products of biotechnology is by now a well-trodden path.
Originally we had whole plants, herbs, fruits, vegetables, roots and grains, prepared by heating, drying, grinding, infusing, fermenting, pressing, decocting, steaming, making salves … with oils, combinations of multiple ingredients, as in Ayurveda and Chinese medicine, etc.
Then we had extracts prepared by fractionation using catalysts, heat, pressure, chemicals, etc. Most NZ butter for example is not prepared by churning cream, but by margarine-like processes, which is how we have spreadable butter, cheap butters with the hard-fat byproducts, and also why our baking doesn’t turn out like our mothers’ did.
Then, particularly post WW2, we have had chemical synthesis and also pesticides and herbicide residues.
Now we have GM crops and biotechnology reproduction of herbal extracts and flavours using methods that are inherently mutagenic due to the high reactivity and mobility of genetic processes. Carotene for example [no] longer comes from carrots, but from a biotech vat.
We are already a long way down that road. We have around 1000 approved pesticides and herbicides used in agriculture. There are over 3000 synthetic food ingredients approved by Medsafe and the number is increasing day by day. These ingredients differ in chemically measurable ways from their natural counterparts, yet they are presumed safe without testing and labelled as natural. This is the kind of useless and risky regulatory regime that the TPB will be offering. If it looks smells, and sounds similar and has the imprimatur of foreign pharmaceutical or biotech industries, it must be OK.
We have reached a situation where we are prepared to accept safety on the say-so of some unknown people and corporations overseas with significant commercial interest in dictating our choices. Instead of personal experience, rational thought, purity of natural ingredients and a traditional history of safe use, we are simply saying to someone we don’t even know, “You can decide for us. We will do whatever you say.” The TPB will enshrine this in law.
It has become a fashion for newly elected politicians to believe that they should regulate all our choices. If our pandemic experience has taught us anything, it is that “safe and effective” coming from the government or industry does not mean safe or effective. The whole endeavour of the TPB is absurd, impossible in practice, inherently risky, very costly, certain to reduce choice and availability of effective safe remedies and damaging to traditional healing practices honoured for millennia and known to be safe. Availability of plants should not be regulated by the government. This legislation is a blank cheque and should be rejected.
Therefore in closing, I would like to thank Winston Peters, NZ First leader and former Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, who has today in his speech reiterated his long-standing opposition to any attempt to regulate Natural Health Products.
More information about attempts to regulate Natural Health Products is contained in my book Discovering and Defending Your DNA Diet—An Ayurvedic Blueprint for Health and Wellness – Leveraging the Power of Consciousness and Plants To Health Ourselves and Our World, available from Amazon as a Kindle or you may order a hard copy here.
