Rick DeSylva is currently serves as a Campaign Director for the Canadian National Health Coalition and media contact for the Canadian Charter of Health Freedom.

Rick DeSylva is a respected herbalist whose company, The Herb Works, provides premium quality herbs and herbal formulae to clientele, natural food stores, and distributors in Canada and internationally.  In 1998, he started an organic herb farm to provide top quality botanicals for his company.  He is an active and current lobbyist for herbalists and herbal medicine, co-founding the Central Canadian Herbal Practitioners Association and the Natural Health Coalition.  He founded The Botanic Institute, an educational establishment for botanic medicine, and he writes and lectures extensively in Canada and internationally. 

He is an activist for over 25 years now.

There are many questions being raised by the possibility of bill C-6 being passed into law in Canada.

For those of you who are not in the know, Bill C-6 is the reintroduction of Bill C-52 in the last parliament. Bill C-6 is going even further in eroding civil and charter constitutional rights. It included in this bill sections on administrative law and introduced penalties that are out of balance with the safety regime that we have. If charged offenders can be fined up to $5 Million dollars, and a new charge would be defined as any day you did not comply with the laws.

Bill C-6 is a Trojan horse bill to enable the Codex Alimentarius food supplement directive. Codex Alimentarius is based on Napoleonic code which is based on the principle that you are guilty until proven innocent. Unless products appear on the products list they cannot be sold. The cost of getting one of your products on these list is absolutely horrendous. The estimated cost of getting your product on the market is around $100,000.

Bill C-6 will rebut and overthrow British Common Law where we are currently considered innocent until proven guilty. Bill C-6 is in contravention of our Canadian legal traditions by its use of the reverse onus legal principle commonly used in Codex Alimentarius.

For more information listen to Rick’s interview with Janet attached with this post.

Fortunately there is a solution to safety of natural health products today and that can be found by upholding our current laws and replacing the current natural health product directorate with the Charter of Health Freedom found at http://www.charterofhealthfreedom.org/

Contacts:

Links:
Alive Magazine: Regulating Natural Remedies: For People or Profit?
The Herb Works
The Charter of Health Freedom
The Canadian National Health Coalition

Health Action Network Society

Alliance for Natural Health

Also check out Mr. Desylva's testimony in the House of Commons:

Mr. Richard DeSylva (Owner and Operator, The Herb Works): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    Cognizant of the time restraints here and the late date at which I was asked to appear, I'm going to read only selected sections of my submission.

    My name is Rick DeSylva. I'm been a practising herbalist since 1977, and most recently, since last year, a doctor of natural medicine.

    In 1986 my company, The Herb Works, began offering for sale to natural health food stores various herbal formulae made from wild-crafted and organically grown botanicals. The business gradually increased over the years, necessitating larger and larger premises. In 1999 we moved to a 5,000-square-foot shop. Within the following two years the company was providing custom manufacturing services to a number of NHP distributors across Canada. Our company had five full-time employees and one part-time staff, not very large compared to most, but given the record of growth and substantial export sales, we felt that the company reached a certain critical mass. Concurrent with these developments was the increasing influence of the NHPD's decisions regarding the regulations that eventually came into force on January 1, 2004.

    A number of issues readily became apparent: one, the recommendations from the 1998 report Natural Health Products: A New Vision were not going to be implemented fully; two, the cost of compliance would be unsustainable for the small to medium manufacturer; and three, products that survived would be greatly reduced in selection and subject to huge increases in the net cost to consumers. The case of tryptophan from 20 years ago comes to mind.

    Costing out compliance for the 30-odd products that The Herb Works offered was approximately $250,000 to $300,000 in start-up costs, and $50,000 per year on ongoing testing, etc. With the realization that I could not afford the cost of compliance, in late November of last year I sold most of my equipment to our biggest co-packing customer, who luckily, in turn, took over the lease and hired my staff.

    This is typical of the decimation that is going to affect the small to medium businesses--proportional to their inability to comply to these regulations and to future measures that will be taken by the enforcement branch of Health Canada over the next two to three years. Given the various estimates from NHPD, CHFA, and Agriculture Canada studies, and from others, the threshold for survival in this market was stated to be anywhere from a minimum of $2 million up to $5 million per year in sales, and further, a minimum of 60%, more likely 80%, of the industry would have to close their doors. This is a very disturbing scenario.

    Many are the critics of Bill C-420 who dismiss this initiative as little more than a tactical manoeuvre, arguing there is no real basis for inclusion under the food side of the Food and Drugs Act. I beg to differ.

    Allow me to quote from the forward in Dr. Carolyn Dean's book, Death by Modern Medicine.. The first of these three forwards comes from Dr. Abraham Hoffer, MD, PhD, FRCP, a man widely acknowledged as the father of orthomolecular medicine:

And further:

    What Dr. Hoffer's observations hint at is the changing paradigm in healing today, the shifting reliance upon drugs back to natural-based food substances. This shift has its roots in socio-cultural, ethnic, philosophical, and yes, even spiritual concepts. These beliefs and value systems do not necessarily subscribe to the germ theory or model of disease advanced by modern medicine, but operate according to more holistic and integrated concepts, such as one might find in the work of Dr. Gunter Enderlein. His major work, Bacterial Cyclogeny, points out how disturbed pH--and by way of aside, there is a balance of acid and alkaline in the body--or overacidification of the blood and tissue sets the stage for a mutation of pathogens in a more dangerous variance, increasingly noted in medical literature today. It is here that proper foods--whether it is vegetable juices or very specialized foods such as herbs--can play an increasingly valuable role in health care today.

    In the past 50 years many have been the natural practitioners who use vegetable juices and specific herbs to help shift this pH, thereby resolving conditions such as arthritis, nerve exhaustion, osteoporosis, or even cancer. That herbs are specialized foods is evident in a detailed examination of their total constituents. Using hawthorn berries as an example, yes, there are substances that have specific cardio-active properties, but of equal value are mineral salts, such as calcium chloride, that serve to tone and nourish the heart muscle, or the mucilage--to use the technical term, mucopolysaccharides or glyco-proteins--that reduce inflammation and restore degraded membranes. Each constituent in hawthorn serves to address a different facet or aspect of the disease process.

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    In the larger picture, herbal formulae--long misunderstood by modern medicine and euphemistically referred as "polypharmacy”--cry out for clarity of purpose. In any given formula, there are primary, secondary, tertiary, and even quarternary herbs.

    The major herbs in a formula address the specific concerns--for example, in the lungs, the accumulation of matter in the lungs or bronchi. They help dissolve mucoid matter, facilitate its expectoration, and even eliminate pathogenic activity. Some of the herbs may lessen nerve irritation that results from this congestion; others serve to astringe tissue expanded by this matter, while others still neutralize inflammation or provide amino-sugars--the mucopolysaccharides I referred to earlier--to restore structural integrity.

    In this manner, they provide phyto-nutrients that offer sanative, restorative, and nutritive factors that bring organ, gland, and tissue back to proper functioning. Again, each constituent will address a different aspect or facet of disease process, or the nutritional deficit behind the ailment, as per the comments of Dr. Hoffer.

    To argue that herbs are specialized foods does not imply that one can consume large quantities of, say, steamed comfrey leaves, much as one would spinach, or drink a large glass of echinacea tincture as one would a glass of wine. Part of this construct that looks upon specialized foods and phyto-nutrients as therapeutic calls for prudence in the same manner as one judiciously uses high-octane foods such as chipotle peppers, wasabi mustard, and horseradish or avoids drinking excess coffee and alcohol, ingesting too much sugar, or even eating too many prunes.

    In summary, left unchecked, these regulations and their enforcement over the next few years will result in the collapse of the small to medium-sized sector of this industry, the segment that provides most of the innovative and unique products. Two, product availability will be substantially reduced, especially from those outside Canada, that cannot or choose not to meet the regulatory requirements. Three, the net cost to consumers will rise substantially, reflecting the cost of compliance. All of these outcomes run counter to the recommendations of the 1998 New Vision report.

    This is a breach of the public's trust and their rights in the matter of freedom of choice. As an aside, an additional note would be the potential cost savings to the government, which has been referred to earlier, given the exploding costs of health care and the public's willingness to absorb costs associated with managing their own health.

    Therefore, I would ask the honourable members of this committee to seriously consider the disproportionate and inappropriate current drug model for regulating these products and the havoc it is causing this industry and, eventually, the public. I would specifically ask that consideration be given to regulating NHPs as a subset of the food directorate, much as it is now the subset of the drug directorate; that there be appropriate amendments, such as the elimination of subsections 3(1) and 3(2); that the current definition of a drug accompany this reclassification to allow for claims; and that a rigorous evidence-based risk assessment model be used, with the onus placed on regulatory authorities to provide any such evidence of harm to an independent panel for evaluation.

    Given their safe history, nature, and widespread use, it is no surprise that the Center for Disease Control in the United States, in Atlanta, Georgia, found them to be much safer than foods. Regulation in this manner will overcome the inadequacies referred to above and restore integrity to the process initiated by the review in 1997.

    Thank you very much.