DIET AID OR DRUG? FDA SAYS HERBAL REMEDY CROSSES LINE.

Byline: Sheryl Gay Stolberg The New York Times

Here in the heart of the nation's herbal and vitamin industry, a stainless steel contraption was hard at work on a recent morning, spitting out clear plastic capsules at the rate of 90,000 an hour. Each contained precisely 600 milligrams of a fine, brick-color powder that federal health officials are trying to ban.

The powder, a pulverized strain of rice called red yeast, is imported from China, where it has been consumed for 2,000 years, both as an herbal remedy (it was thought to improve blood flow) and a food (it spices up tofu and makes a tasty marinade for duck and pork.)

Then, five years ago, William McGlashan Jr., a young California venture capitalist, learned that scientists in Beijing were studying the rice for another reason: It seemed to lower cholesterol.

Today, McGlashan's company, Pharmanex, sells the encapsulated red powder under the trade name Cholestin in 37,000 American stores, from health food outlets to the giant Wal-Mart chain. McGlashan calls Cholestin a dietary supplement. Officials at the Food and Drug Administration call it something else: an illegal, unapproved drug.

On Monday, in the gray stone U.S. courthouse in Salt Lake City, Judge Dale Kimball will be asked to determine who is correct. The case is being watched as a pivotal battle between the FDA, which is chafing against a 1994 law that left it almost powerless to regulate vitamins and herbal products, and the dietary supplement industry, which has been growing wildly since the law was passed.

At issue is not whether Cholestin is dangerous - no one argues that it is. Rather, the FDA contends that Cholestin has crossed the increasingly murky boundary that separates dietary supplements from drugs, because it contains an ingredient, lovastatin, that is the key component of a cholesterol-lowering drug. Pharmanex says the lovastatin occurs naturally and that Cholestin is more akin to a food than a drug.

The outcome of the case could affect the medicine and kitchen cabinets of millions of American consumers, including many doctors and scientists, who have come to believe that herbs like ginkgo, echinacea and St. John's wort are as important to good health as aspirin and antibiotics.

The key question

Aside from the turf battle between the supplement industry and regulators, the dispute raises crucial questions: What is the distinction between these herbal products, which may contain naturally occurring chemicals as potent as those in any drug, and drugs themselves?

Must products like Cholestin be subjected to the rigorous testing that drugs undergo?

``You see more and more dietary supplements sold right next to over-the-counter drugs,'' said William Schultz, the FDA's deputy commissioner for policy. ``There is a risk that the line will blur.''

It is already blurry. ``Foods are medicines, medicines are foods,'' said Loren Israelson, executive director of the Utah Natural Products Alliance, a trade group based in Salt Lake City. ``If you drink coffee in the morning, why are you drinking coffee? You're looking for the caffeine, a stimulant. That same caffeine is sold over the counter as No-Doz. That's a drug when it's in a pill form, and it's a food when it's in coffee. Why is that?''

The FDA struggled with such questions for decades. But with the passage of the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, the law under which the Cholestin case will be decided, the agency's task grew even more vexing.

The new law took dietary supplements out of the underground and into the mainstream, giving manufacturers like Pharmanex the long-sought right to advertise the potential benefits of herbs, even if the evidence for those benefits was sketchy. If the products were safe, companies could say what they wished, so long as they did not claim their products could prevent, treat or cure disease. Thus, McGlashan can advertise that Cholestin ``promotes healthy cholesterol,'' but not that it ``prevents heart attack or stroke.''

``For the first time,'' he said, ``we can educate the American consumer about what the product does. We don't have to rely on a person in a health food store to explain it.''

Since the law was passed, the FDA has received about 2,300 notifications from manufacturers intending to make claims about their products, and has objected to about 150 of them. It has also proposed a rule that would restrict, but not eliminate, the manufacturer's ability to use the herbal stimulant ephedra, which has been linked to more than a dozen deaths nationwide.

``It's out of control''

But these actions, says former Food and Drugs Commissioner David Kessler, are hardly enough to make a dent in the rampant proliferation of herbal remedies that he says are ineffective at best and unsafe at worst.

``Just walk into your pharmacy, it's out of control,'' said Kessler, who waged a bitter, unsuccessful battle against the 1994 law as commissioner. ``Efficacy is now defined as what sells off the shelves. The agency is powerless.''

While the law was a disaster for regulators, it was a windfall for businesses that sell herbs and vitamins. Indeed, after the act was adopted, annual sales of dietary supplements in the United States skyrocketed, jumping from more than $8 billion in 1994 to nearly $12 billion last year, according to the Nutrition Business Journal, a trade publication.

So furious has the growth been that one analyst, Matthew Patsky of the Boston-based investment banking firm of Adams, Harkness & Hill, said some of the nation's biggest pharmaceutical companies are now planning to introduce their own lines of herbal products.

That worries Schultz, the FDA deputy commissioner for policy. ``If companies that would have tested their products and sold them as drugs are now going to not test them and sell them as dietary supplements,'' he said, ``then we have lost information about the safety and efficacy of those products.''

Among the law's beneficiaries was McGlashan, a 34-year-old Stanford University business school graduate who studied Chinese history as an undergraduate. With the baby boomers growing older, McGlashan sensed a growing demand for natural medicines the Chinese have used for centuries.

McGlashan contends that, at its root, the dispute is an economic one. Cholestin, he said, is sold to people who are too healthy for Mevacor, the Merck drug. Merck, he contends, is making a power grab for that market by trying to push Cholestin off the shelves - a charge denied by Jan Weiner, a spokeswoman for the pharmaceutical company.

While the court case is pending, McGlashan said, sales of Cholestin are booming. One woman recently wrote him to say she had purchased eight months' worth of the capsules. Even his mother called, he said, asking, ``How am I supposed to get my Cholestin?''

For now, McGlashan has no answer. Standing outside the low-pressure room where the encapsulating machine was spinning, a lab coat covering his royal blue shirt and Hermes tie, he looked a little wistful. The fine red powder being packed into the capsules, he said, was the last of his supply.