State laws
January 1999

Several dozen states have taken measures to regulate dietary supplements. For example, in Florida some products containing ephedrine are banned. Like federal laws, state laws often provide no appreciable safety benefit to the public while imposing greatly on manufacturers and consumers.

Perhaps the most arbitrary state law is California's Prop 65, the "Clean Drinking Water Act", passed in 1986. This was a petition initiative sold to the public as a means for ensuring that drinking water and consumer products would be free of carcinogens or substances of potential danger to reproductive health. It is so stringent that under this law, action was taken against a candle maker because the candles emit smoke when burned and smoke contains carcinogens. In another case, a manufacturer lost $3 million when charged for selling a calcium supplement that contained lead - at only one one-thousandth known toxic levels! Ironically, the law does not apply to drinking water at all.