Marion Edmunds
THEY are called the “Gestapo”. These are not the security police but the men from the Medicines Control Council (MCC) inspectorate who stand accused of raiding and harassing homeopaths and dispensers of natural medicines. And while some homeopaths have sunk into silence for fear of having their businesses closed down, others have started to mobilise to lobby for new laws to accommodate natural medicine in the new South Africa.
Two organisations have been formed this month to fight what is seen as an arbitrary clampdown by the MCC on natural products – including ginseng – over the last few months. They are the Confederation of Complementary Health Associations of South Africa (Cochasa) and the more radical People’s Health Alliance Rejecting Medical Authoritarianism, Prejudice and Conspiratorial Tyranny (Pharma-pact).
Cochasa chairman Michael O’Brien addressed a meeting of natural health practitioners in Cape Town this week urging them to back a nationwide campaign to prevent alternative medicine from yielding to the MCC, the body that tests and registers medicines for the government.
“There has been a rash of blocking imports over the last two months or so, and there seems to be a sort of backlash by the MCC, a sudden crackdown. We have heard about the people being raided, about products being taken off shelves and threats to close down businesses, of 80% of all products in some health shops being removed,” he said. O’Brien indicated the sudden spurt of raids appears to have been prompted by complaints to the MCC from established natural medicine companies, who up to now have had the lion’s share of the market.
The political changes in 1994, and the end to sanctions, has meant the entry of many new products and a flood of natural medicines which has apparently caused larger companies to feel the pinch.
The MCC has, in response to the complaints, cracked down harshly and it seems in some instances, arbitrarily, removed products from shelves and shops. Dr Lotze Heiner has had all his herbal products embargoed, after successfully producing them and dispensing them through his company, Bioharmony, for eight years.
“I have been battling for eight years to be registered as a naturopath, but two weeks after I was registered this year the inspectorate embargoed all my products so I cannot work. I can tell people to go into the forest and what herb to pick, but I cannot give it to them,” he said.
Heiner and others point out that the MCC’s sudden flurry of activity has led to the application of a 1965 law, which is not in tune with recent trends in natural medicines. Heiner is pinning his hopes on Cochasa and O’Brien’s negotiations. O’ Brien is forging ahead with a series of meetings in early December in a bid to set up an alternative council to deal with the regulation of natural medicines, remedies and products, one of which would comprise relevant experts.
He has already held meetings with the Health Department’s director general Olive Shisana and the chairman of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee Dr Abe Nkomo on ways to revise the legal definition of medicine.
Others are more aggressive. The chairman of Pharmapact, Stewart Thomson, is filing an action against the MCC in the Constitutional Court in the first quarter of next year, following a visit to his Knysna laboratory by the inspectors. They embargoed a number of his personal care products.
“We are talking about them banning all herbal products, and the rest will have to be registered as medicines. And this at a time when traditional healers are totally unregulated. You can buy their remedies on the street pavements where people walk past and spit. The MCC claim to be protecting the public but they are just protecting the pharmaceutical companies,” Thomson said.
The Department of Health and the MCC had not commented at the time of going to press. Nkomo said it was ANC policy to support natural medicines and homeopathy, but did not want to comment further.