Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-03-12-Speech-2-301"
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"en.20020312.12.2-301"2
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"Mr President, last year in Britain alone, 5 000 people died from overdosing on alcohol. They drank themselves to death in one session. Yet I do not see a directive before us to require alcohol to be submitted to all sorts of safety tests, or for bottles of Guinness or Strasbourg wine to carry the strongest possible health warnings. So why on earth are the manufacturers of food supplements being told that they must jump through a series of expensive hoops, which may be so costly as to drive some of them out of business, in order to keep their products on the market?
My colleague, Frederick Ries, says that not all vitamins are safe, but of course you can kill yourself on anything if you eat enough of it. You can stuff yourself with baked beans until you die, but unlike alcohol or most pharmaceutical products, vitamin and food supplements do not have a track record of killing people. On the contrary, I, like Mr Blokland, have a stack of letters which testify that many do a great deal of good.
This directive, therefore, is like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut! Better labelling would have been sufficient to provide such protection as is needed, but perhaps that would not have been enough to satisfy the big drug companies, which are seeking to control a lucrative market.
I remember the Commissioner telling us not long ago that under his regime we would have less interference of the kind which angers many European citizens for no good reason. However, when it comes to Brussels proving that it wants to treat people like an interfering nanny, this directive really does take the biscuit."@en1
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