AHPA seeks new leader as McGuffin to step asideAHPA seeks new leader as McGuffin to step aside
The American Herbal Products Association is seeking a new leader. Michael McGuffin will step aside after 25 years at the organization’s helm.

At a Glance
- AHPA has started search for new leader.
- Michael McGuffin has led the group since 1999.
The American Herbal Products Association is looking for a new president as Michael McGuffin transitions into a new role as senior advisor.
McGuffin has had a 25-year career with AHPA, having taken up the reins in 1999. He worked in both manufacturing and retail in the herbal sector prior to his trade organization career.
“It has been an honor to lead both this incredible organization and the fight to ensure our families, friends and neighbors have access to safe, high-quality herbal products and dietary supplements and that our members have a collective voice and the resources they need to succeed despite an ever-evolving regulatory landscape and marketplace,” McGuffin said. “After a long and fulfilling career at the helm of AHPA, this moment feels like the right time for both the organization and for me personally to embrace a change in leadership.”
AHPA said it is encouraging interested people within its network to contact the search committee at [email protected]. In addition, the organization said it will engage recruiting firms to aid in the search. AHPA did not respond to a request for comment.
Illustrious career
McGuffin’s successor will have big shoes to fill. McGuffin, who will stay on as president until his replacement is hired, was involved with the discussions that led up the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) that created the modern dietary supplement marketplace.
He also was a leader in the effort to pass into law the Dietary Supplement and Nonprescription Drug Consumer Protection Act in 2006. That created a serious adverse event reporting system for OTC drugs and dietary supplements.
McGuffin also oversaw the publication and updating of AHPA’s Herbs of Commerce, which is the standard industry reference for herbal nomenclature. The third edition of the work was published in 2023.
He has long been a champion of consumer access to natural herbal products. While the adverse event reporting law was a needed and valuable addition to regulation, McGuffin has sought to pare down the industry’s regulatory burden as much as possible to focus on ensuring safety. He has shined a spotlight on those aspects of regulation perceived as burdensome or poorly thought out.
AHPA regulatory priorities: Drug exclusion clause
McGuffin laid out some of AHPA’s regulatory priorities in a webinar hosted in 2022 by Jon Benninger, vice president and market leader with Informa Markets, who focuses on the strategic direction and growth of the SupplySide portfolio. A new president of AHPA would presumably be expected to carry these initiatives forward.
McGuffin said AHPA has made it a priority to seek a change to the so-called drug exclusion clause, a portion of DSHEA that governs the interplay of new ingredients that could exist in the market as both a supplement ingredient and as a prescription drug.
Under the law, if an ingredient has been marketed as a dietary supplement first, it may remain in U.S. commerce as a supplement, even if a pharmaceutical company subsequently chooses to bring a drug to market based on the same “article” or ingredient.
However, if the substance has first been authorized for investigation as a new drug and meets other criteria, it may never subsequently be marketed as a supplement ingredient, absent a notice-and-comment rulemaking.
McGuffin noted that the closing of those markets to supplements permanently unfairly restricts consumer access to natural products. The reasoning for the clause is that FDA wants to encourage and protect investments in new drugs. But McGuffin noted that a prescription drug form of fish oil (Lovaza) was successfully brought to market even though many omega-3 fish oils sold as supplements were on the market at the same time. Before going off patent, Lovaza, which was marketed for heart health, topped $1 billion in annual sales.
Mandatory Product Listing
McGuffin said AHPA has also taken the stance that calls for mandatory product listing (MPL) are misguided. FDA has proposed a legislative requirement for dietary supplement companies to notify the agency when bringing a new product to market and to provide some basic information about it, such as dosage and constituents.
Some stakeholders in the industry support FDA’s proposal. However, McGuffin said in 2018 that AHPA had taken a decision “to not support mandatory product listing based on our view that dietary supplements [are] very robustly regulated and that FDA has all the authority it needs to enforce these regulations.”
McGuffin said the suggestions for how MPL would work, including a bill introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), would create significant burdens for manufacturers without doing much to protect consumers.
McGuffin noted there are dozens of food recalls annually due to microbial contamination or other reasons. There is no MPL for food products, yet FDA has no trouble finding those products when it needs to, he noted.
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