Politics is about trade-offs. Perhaps a reason President Biden isn't better-regarded is because if Congress didn't give him what he wanted, he circumvents them with agencies he controls, such as OSHA with vaccine mandates, the CDC with rent control, and EPA to ban safe weedkillers and pesticides.

He can take a page out of Presidents Clinton and Bush 43 on how to do better if he wins again this fall.

Neither started off easily. President Clinton won with just over 40 percent of the vote(1), thanks to Ross Perot siphoning votes away from the incumbent, President George H.W. Bush, yet he proceeded to act as if he had a mandate; that was his undoing early on. He tasked his wife, the future Senator and Secretary Clinton, with implementing a government health care takeover, and by 1994, with Congress at risk due to voters resenting his agenda, he began to go down a different path.(2)

If he couldn't reshape health care at the macro level he could change medicine from the inside. President Clinton believed in a lot of 'woo', and his party was spook central when it came to supernatural effects; ghosts, endocrine disrupting chemicals, psychics, and folk medicine. He had Senator Tom Harkin as a true believer and with Orrin Hatch of the Republican party in a state that had a lot of supplement companies, he brokered a bipartisan deal to shore up his constituents.

By making the alternatives to medicine they believed in exempt from real FDA oversight, and even giving taxpayer money earmarked for science instead to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, so trials could show once again that acupuncture is only a placebo, they could reward constituents with a veil of science in front of turmeric.

In 1994, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act became law. With it, unvalidated nonsense went from folk medicine to traditional medicine to alternative medicine - which made it sound like medicine, but not corporate medicine, which Democrats seemed not to like.(3) 

DSHEA is why products like tianeptine - "gas station heroin" - are in the news. They aren't being sold illegally, gas station owners are not rogues importing toxic chemicals from overseas to make $.25, it is made possible because DSHEA created a giant umbrella of exempt products.

All they have to do in ads and on packaging is write “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration" in a tiny font and they are clean. They also have to state "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" in similar tiny print after intimating it does that very thing.

DSHEA forbids FDA from reviewing supplement labels before a product is released so they got away with a lot unless they kill someone. Because what is a supplement? Anything that people take 'found in nature' seems to be an easy default. Yet ingredients of many drugs can be 'found in nature.' Tianeptine has been used since the 1960s and is approved all over Europe, Asia, and Latin American countries. Here it can only be a supplement because it hasn't gone through FDA, but why would it when it can be sold without spending a billion dollars and 15 years to get through the bureaucracy?

Though endocrine disrupting activists and other homeopathy proponents deny that 'the dose makes the poison' it obviously does, and while tianeptine at small doses is believed to act as an anti-depressant or the supplement go-to "improves brain function", at higher doses it works the way an opioid does. Companies selling it tout that it is much safer than fentanyl, it is more like melatonin.

It is not, it is "gas station heroin" and legal to buy, because a president and a Senator wanted to exempt supplements from oversight and brokered a deal to pass bills 1990s conservatives sought in exchange for the votes.


Kratom is also still legal, despite it being recklessly dangerous. See: Kratom: Will This Supplement Kill Godzilla?

Tianeptine is just one product, thanks to DSHEA running rampant over public health for 30 years, there are 50,000 suspect products being sold in the US. They can't "claim" it cures anxiety legally so they do what epidemiologists do and "suggest" it does. Kratom - found in nature! - and phenibut are just as bad, but if you believe powdered rhino horns have magical properties you probably also believe if it's used in Asia, it must be better than science.

Read also: Are Herbal Supplements Safe? Ask Lamar Odom

Presdient Biden is not going to undo DSHEA when he is having EPA scientists replaced by epidemiologists to get more science banned, but we can start to demand that whoever succeeds him take a hard long at how many illnesses and deaths occur due to the $30 billion supplement industry.

It will be a long road, their lobbyists are well-paid and well-connected inside the Democratic party, and a whole segment of their voters want to stay away from "prescription medication" and get addicted to adulterated, dangerous, FDA-exempt substitutes. Trade groups for companies selling this stuff say only a few dozen people are killed by their products each year and engage in WhatAboutIsm using real medicine, but those are only the harms we know about.

Hospitals don't test for tianeptine or thousands of other compounds in supplements, and supplements send tens of thousands of people to the hospital, problems that could have been avoided if FDA was allowed to do its job.

NOTES:

(1) And it worked. Though he cut funding for NASA and NIH was flat, which means they lost funding, and he refused to allow federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research, having a fiscally conservative Congress from 1995 on helped the economy a lot. Which he now credits to his policies. That's politics too.

(2) When President Bush won, Democrats alleged election tampering and called for abolishment of the Electoral College, which they did again after losing in 2016. Since Republicans tried that argument in 2020, maybe Democrats see how ridiculous it is. Though their anti-vaccine beliefs and anti-Semitism have started to come back again, so maybe not.

(3) That has changed. Much like Democrats fought a whole war to keep slaves, and somehow not losing control of the southern US until 1972, when an avowed KKK member named George Wallace was teed up to be their presidential nominee, they argue their opposition is racist, and when their opposition showed concern about the COVID-19 vaccine, Democrats reversed course after 25 years and stopped saying vaccines caused autism and that only 'needs more study' indefinite regulation would save us from science.