Thread: Our always despotic government declares Vitamin B6 illegal!

Are you kidding me? I don't know what to say...God dammit! I haven't ever used this stuff to lucid dream, but at least it always sat in the back of my head as an option if I decided I needed that extra kick.

Ok, as I finished writing that paragraph, I picked up my bottle of supplements I take every day and it turns out they contain B6... This means I might not be able to get those supplements anymore. Luckily, this may not be the case as I think it's a different form of vitamin B6.

Hercuflea, thanks for the heads up. I'm going to go out and buy some B6 ASAP before this unrighteous banning of yet another harmless substance hits the local grocery stores. Let's hope it hasn't already.

Good plan, but from now on i'd keep that to myself

They aren't banning B6 as a whole, only Pyridoxamine, and Pyridoxine is what's used as the vitamin supplement (I think). Besides, they're only stopping it from being marked as a "dietary supplement." If a company were to label it as something else I'm pretty sure it could still me marketed.


Albeit the whole situation is kind of silly.

In the article it says "any nutritional supplements containing pyridoxamine will be considered adulterated and illegal by the FDA, which may raid vitamin companies and seize such products."

So, anything that the FDA, not the companies, calls a "nutritional supplement" is now in danger.

This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

Originally Posted by esfx

This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

Care to elaborate?

This is so dumb! I sure am tempted to stock up on my vitamin B! Besides the fact that it helps me with LDing, I depend on this stuff for energy throughout the day!

Banning a naturally occurring vitamin from being used in dietary supplements... A VITAMIN...

Shit guys, let's ban water from being distributed in bottles, it's not natural that way and should only be consumed from direct sources. We'll call bottled water a drug, since drinking it is good for you...

I just had a real WTF moment.

My WTF moment is not going end anytime soon.

..


.....



Nope, it's still going.

WTF.

Well, the source doesn't exactly boost my confidence in this story, especially when all the links therein only go to similarly biased sites. So I did my own poking around.

Firstly, they are only banning Pyridoxamine, as CatBus pointed out, whereas almost all vitamin supplements contain Pyridoxine. Secondly, I actually went to the FDA website and found some of the petitions to ban this. While I don't know the legitimacy of the claims against Pyridoxamine, or even if they are the justification used in this case, they deserve some looking into instead of going "waah evil government".

In September of 2005, Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN) senior vice president of scientific and international affairs, John Hathcock, PhD, wrote a letter to the FDA stating that ?Pyridoxamine is unequivocally a dietary ingredient because it is one of the three primary natural forms of vitamin B6, and it is one of the two predominant forms in animal products used as human foods.?

But now, thanks to a petition filed with the FDA by Biostratum, the North Carolina-based manufacturer of a pyridoxamine-based drug called Pyridorin, which is designed to prevent the progression of diabetic nephropathy (kidney disease), on January 12 the FDA announced that pyridoxamine dihydrochloride was a ?new drug.? This means that the FDA has now effectively prevented any substance containing pyridoxamine from being marketed as a dietary supplement. Never mind that the fish on your lunch salad and the chicken on your dinner table both contain pyridoxamine, as does brewer?s yeast!

I'll expand later, I've got to go.

@Sybot

Yes, they are only banning Pyridoxine, whereas almost all vitamin supplements contain it. So, essentially they are banning almost all vitamin supplements, should they enforce it. They don't seem to have any reasoning behind it, either.

Originally Posted by Hercuflea

@Sybot

Yes, they are only banning Pyridoxine, whereas almost all vitamin supplements contain it.

Pyridoxamine =/= Pyridoxine

I'm assuming Pyridoxine is the substance that aids in dreaming? I looked on the bottles of a bunch of vitamins when I was at the grocery store today and did not see Pyridoxamine at all. What do they even use Pyridoxamine for?

Though it seems scarcely used, I still don't think it was right for the government to outlaw a vitamin. It is evident that this act was done to eliminate Pyridoxine from the market so consumers would be forced to buy this fancy expensive drug, when they could have bought the vitamin for similar effects.

Oh, it's completely evident. After all, the article said so. And nobody knows fair and unbiased reporting quite like "prisonplanet.com."

I did not get the above quote from Prison Planet. I'm really not sure what to take of this. I'd like to hear the FDA's reasoning behind this so I could judge for myself if they're full of bullshit or not. Somebody hurry up and dig it up!

I think i found the FDA response that is bringing all this up. I love articles that don't link directly to the source, don't you?

http://www.naturalproductsassoc.org/...pdf?docID=9001

14 pages. Enjoy.

Oh, this makes me so mad. I'm seriously going to buy a couple bottles of my vitamin B complex sublingual liquid. I looked at the ingredients, and Pyridoxine is listed as the form of vitamin B6 in it.

Originally Posted by DuB

Pyridoxamine =/= Pyridoxine

^^^This^^^ seems to need to be repeated. The ban is on the former, not the latter guys. You can probably still get the very same form of B6 you've been getting all along. Check ingredients a bit more closely.

...while they simultaneously lower scheduling/penalties of crack. unbelievable.

I wonder if my drug dealer will start carrying vitamins now...

Hopefully this will show more people how ridiculous the war on drugs is.

"George bush says 'We are losing the war on drugs'. Well you know what that implies, theres a war going on and people on drugs are winning it. Well what does that tell you about drugs. Some smart creative mutherfuckers on that side."-Bill Hicks

Originally Posted by DuB

Pyridoxamine =/= Pyridoxine

Originally Posted by Forsaken

^^^This^^^ seems to need to be repeated. The ban is on the former, not the latter guys. You can probably still get the very same form of B6 you've been getting all along. Check ingredients a bit more closely.

Thiiiiiissss.

Come on guys, read.

^^^ But still where do they get the prerogative, or the reasoning, to ban it? I dont care if its pyridoxamine, pyridoxine, orange juice, or teletubbies. The Feds have no Constitutional authority to keep people from taking substances into their bodies.

I read that 14-page FDA letter half way. Out of the 7 pages I read, it seems like the FDA said Pyridoxamine had similar effects to the new drug the corporation created with the main ingredient of Pyridoxamine. Therefore marketing Pyridoxamine was like marketing an new, untested experimental drug.

I may be missing something since I've only read half of the document. I may also be misconceiving the wording. Does anybody who read the document agree?

Originally Posted by Hercuflea

The Feds have no Constitutional authority to keep people from taking substances into their bodies.

Ummm.... since when do you have a constitutional right to free vitamin consumption?

I don't know why people still take multivitamins anymore, anyways. Practically every study in the past 10 years has pointed to their overall harmful effects. If we are going to regulate substances, we need to be fair and stop allowing drugs hide behind the "nutritional supplement" guise. I'm sick of vitamin companies selling lies and taking advantage of peoples ignorance.