Fighting for DSHEA at the Grassroots Level

1990 was a turbulent year for alternative medicine practitioners and the natural products industry. Events that unfolded that year and during the next two and a half years led to a maelstrom of citizen discontent with state medical boards, obsessed critics of alternative health and, particularly, FDA. Events that unfolded through the summer of 1992 not only laid the foundation for the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) in 1994, but the creation of one of the most historic grassroots movements ever seen in the countrys history.

In early September 1990, the organization Citizens For Health (CFH) was founded by industry members concerned with proposed threatening legislation to the supplement industry. At the time, we did not realize we had just begun a grassroots organization that by 1993, would grow to 165 chapters in 50 states, two territories and five countries.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) reached out to CFH looking for help to bi-partisan support of his legislation, then known as the Health Freedom Act of 1990.

Learn how CHF recruited Rep. Bill Richardson (D-NM) to back the bill and how the organization help launch the Nothing-For-Sale Sale" throughout New Mexico and the nation in INSIDER's History of DSHEA Digital Issue.