EU clamp-down on natural health

The seaside village of Praia da Luz, near Lagos, is known for many reasons. One of these is the fact that for the last eight years it has boasted arguably the best natural health shop in the region. Owner Meri Hanlin has made it her life’s work to know all the ins-and-outs of herbal remedies. She has a long list of customers who came to her “very ill” and now enjoy “new lives” thanks to natural medicines they’ve discovered in her shop. Often, these medicines cost a fraction of the price of the drugs they’d previously been on - but which “they no longer felt well enough to use”.

Two weeks ago – the 11th hour before the «Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive» comes into force – Meri travelled to London’s Natural and Organic Products Expo in Olympia, which was promoting a number of seminars designed to try and steer people through the looming euro-nightmare of herbal bureaucracy. At the time, she felt nothing was being done in Portugal, and that May 1st would herald a desperate new dawn.

Indeed, Luz’s pharmacy, a stone’s throw away from her shop – and which also stocks a range of natural medicines – “knew nothing of the EU directive” when a customer asked them about it last week.

The directive was actually passed way back in 2004 on the proviso that it would become law by 2011. The official reason stated by the EU was to “provide a regulatory approval process for herbal medicines in the European Union”.

All preparations now face a whole new approval procedure which opponents claim will cost an average of “at least 100.000 pounds per polyherbal product”. In other words, the sort of expenditure that only big pharmaceutical companies can afford…

“I was desperate when I went to London,” says Meri. “I feel a huge responsibility to my customers. I’ve taken on so many over the years who were very ill, and who now have new lives. I can’t give up on them. I just didn’t know what to do”.

And, at first, the news coming out of the seminars was such that on leaving one of them, she was forced to stop. “I couldn’t see where I was going”, she explains, “and then I realised it was because I was crying so hard…”

But then something wonderful happened. Her own resolve and absolute determination to continue working with herbal remedies brought her into contact with other like-minded people. Herbal growers and suppliers determined to “save natural health” have suddenly become “firm-friends-in-the-frontline”.

“It’s a race against time, but amazing things are happening”.

And then she discovered to her “total joy”, that Portugal wasn’t sitting back and waiting to be clobbered.

One of her largest suppliers assured her that they’d “relabelled” everything in order to comply with the new laws. Playing the bureaucrats at their own game, medicinal products have masterfully been relabelled as “food supplements”, and elsewhere, companies that have the resources are “branding” herbal products, which means they’ll pass through the directive’s minefield.

“I went to England in fear, but I’ve come back a completely different person. I have a new will to live” she smiles, “It has energised me beyond belief!”

As the May 1st deadline looms, she’s busy liaising with suppliers from the UK – where Common Law means the directive will have less effect, and many hundreds of herbal products can claim immunity on the basis that they’ve been used for centuries.

Southern Europe’s Napoleonic Law means, however, that the directive will be impossible to circumnavigate by natural practitioners who have previously done all their herb importing themselves. Even a licensed herbalist – who will still be able to practice in the UK – will find it impossible to do so legally in Portugal, Spain, Greece, France and other southern European countries.

“We’ve just got to all keep going, and hope that within the next few years something will be done to reverse all this madness”, Meri concludes.

Which is precisely what the Alliance For Natural Health is doing. Their petition site www.savenaturalhealth.eu is amassing thousands of signatures (in one week alone in France, it raised over 100.000 – and last week it was expected to gather millions throughout Europe).

Backed by the «League for Natural Medicine», the alliance aims “to convict the EU of cultural discrimination, lack of transparency and disproportionality combined with a restriction of freedom”. It is appealing for donations and has raised over 90.000 pounds towards legal costs.

In a video appeal posted on Youtube, the alliance condemns the directive as an “unprecedented attack on the right to treat ourselves with alternative medicines”.

“Thousands of years of valuable knowledge is at risk of being definitively lost for the entire European continent and its inhabitants if the EU manages to impose its directive”.

“Only by actively fighting for our rights can we stop the joint drive by the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations and the European Union”, they add.

“Silence is consent. If you do nothing the European bureaucrats will assume that nobody cares”…

For more information see: www.anh-europe.org/ and www.gaia-health.com