Certainly such health products like Chlorella, Wheat grass, Barley grass and Spirulina will be soon classified as a drug if the TGA has its way!

Please read the below information and then sign the petition at: http://www.healthpetitions.com.au/stop-the-tga-classifying-our-food-as-drugs

In the recent proposed changes to legislation the TGA states:

"In Australia, it has long been recognised that there is a legislative ‘interface’, or overlap, between foods and medicines for human oral consumption. As the food and complementary medicine sectors have evolved over recent years, a ‘grey area’ has unintentionally developed at this food-medicine interface. The confusion is due to certain areas of food legislation and therapeutic goods legislation overlapping in such a way that makes it difficult to determine which legislation should be applied in many cases."

http://www.tga.gov.au/docs/html/cmec/section7.htm 
http://www.tga.gov.au/cm/consult/cons-s7declaration.pdf

The real reason for this over lap is that the TGA regulates health supplements as medicines. Health supplements should be regulated in a third category of their own, just as they are now or soon to be in New Zealand. If this happened then foods would not be regulated as drugs or medicines. This is the fault of the TGA's regulation and not the fault of the health supplement industry!

We use natural health products as foods and not medicine. Yes good food keeps us healthy but it is not a drug! We do not find the existing laws misleading or confusing as the TGA has insisted .

In fact, changing the law as the TGA is suggesting makes the new laws even more confusing.

We as consumers understand the difference between foods and medicines and we do not need the TGA to define this for us. We are intelligent human beings, we read the labels, we educate ourselves. It may be confusing to the TGA but it is not confusing to the public!

This law benefits the bigger health companies of which are mostly owned or majority controlled by drug companies. This proposal by the TGA will raise the costs of entry point into the health food market for small business, leaving a monopoly for larger companies.

Turning such food products into medicines is misleading on the TGA's behalf and serves also the financial interests of the TGA, as it generates more income with regards to annual audits and listing on the TGA Therapeutic Register of a health product. These costs will then be passed on to consumers.

For example, such products as Chlorella, Wheat grass, Barley grass and Spirulina, under the TGA's proposed plans, will become a drug and a medicine. These products will then become more expensive to purchase. This is outrageous!

People prefer these foods in a capsule form during travel, or because the taste may not be desirable to the palate, or just simply as it is easier to monitor how much of the food they have ingested, this does not make them a therapeutic good (drug).

Does this mean that the TGA will also categorise products, available from food retail, such as sodium saccharin tablets as a drug? This is the same sodium saccharin which has been linked to cancer (but still available to the public). Or will the TGA make exemptions for dangerous products like sodium saccharin to be freely available as a food?

Over the years the TGA and its officers seem to have forgotten about their original charter, and now we are seeing what is commonly called "regulatory creep".

The whole primary raison d'être for the TGA is to keep us safe from dangerous drugs, which the TGA is not doing such a good job of. Remember Vioxx? The TGA did nothing! Merck Sharp & Dohme eventually pulled the Vioxx off the market voluntarily after it had already killed 50,000 people

This is the same TGA who's officers (Fiona Cumming) shredded minutes of an official meeting, notes that showed there was "not much evidence" to issue a Class 1 recall of health supplements from the company PAN. After destroying the minutes of the meeting Cumming then proceeded to suspend Pan's licence, sending the largest health supplement company in Australia bankrupt!

This latest lunacy from the TGA amounts to a form of legislative schizophrenia in which foods become dangerous drugs and dangerous chemicals like fluoride (complete with arsenic, lead, cadmium and other heavy metals) is legislated as a essential nutrient required for our good health, yes you heard me correctly. Click here for more about this fluoride insanity.

Maybe the TGA and its officers should be prescribed anti psychotic drugs for their behaviour...then they might even get a first hand experience about the dangerous side effects! Or maybe they are taking them already and this would account for their behaviour? All jokes aside, this is clearly a profit and corporate driven agenda and its got nothing to do with consumer safety.

The TGA should keep its hands off our foods! Food is a food and drugs are potentially dangerous products produced by drug companies! There is a large difference and we do not find the definition confusing, nor should the TGA!

The amendments to Section 7 of the Therapeutics Goods Act should not be implemented in any form.

We call on the Federal Minister for Health and the TGA to withdraw this proposal.