I have a pretty serious grudge against Big Pharma (if anybody reads this blog at all, they probably know this, or would find out). As such, I feel the need to post an article that I found pretty truthful about the state of Big Pharma, and the influence it has on current political and societal affairs.
NOTE: I didn’t write the following article… that honor goes to Dr. Carlon M. Colker, and this article is in the February 2009 issue of Muscular Development. Since www.musculardevelopment.com doesn’t have the following article up, and it likely won’t be up for a VERY long time, I’ve re-written this word for word from the Muscular Development magazine. This took almost two hours to type up, so please try to read this.
DSHEA Under Attack… Again!
(By Carlon M. Colker, MD, FACN)
It’s been years since the trials and tribulations of ephedra. Back then, I suffered the indignity of being one of the most oft-cited ephedra researchers in the world. Metabolife, Ripped Fuel, Xenadrine RFA-1, Hydroxycut, etc. You name it and I did the research. As a result, I endured dozens of depositions, federal and state court testimony, and appearances before Congress, not to mention being named in numerous lawsuits! I was dropped from all of them without even a single case against me, but it all still sucked. In the end, ephedra was unjustifiably banned and taken out of the hands of the public and now apparently only safe if the drug company supplies it! It took me several years and the advantage of perspective at a distance to see who was really behind all that and why. In my view, the bottom line in all that crap was that it was the pharmaceutical industry simply using ephedra as the foil to try and overturn the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (also known as “DSHEA”). I’ll explain.
In America, our access to natural elements in the form of dietary supplements is perhaps the single most precious tool we have as free people to determine our own health, find our own natural cures and prevent illness and disease from killing us. It’s our right as Americans and in so being, there’s a law that protects our free access to nature’s healing power. It’s called DSHEA. It was passed into law in 1994 by way of thunderous support from the American people. DSHEA empowers Americans with the right to freely purchase dietary supplements without a prescription or limits, provided that the supplements have not been proven to be dangerous. It’s that simple. Companies and individuals have the legal right to sell dietary supplements and, thanks to DSHEA, we have every right to legally seek them out, possess them and take them at our own will.
Obviously, that angers the drug companies, who know all too well the power of nature. That’s because the only cures they control come from nature (take, for example, antibiotics like penicillin – it’s natural!). Well, big pharma wants to take free access to nature away. As a result, DSHEA continues to be repeatedly attacked by corrupted politicians, lawsuits and legislation driven by the pharmaceutical industry (also known as “big pharma”). I believe that big pharma wants to destroy DSHEA because it’s a direct competitive threat to their stranglehold on health care. That’s why they want to control it and that’s why they lobby so hard against DSHEA.
So, in my opinion, big pharma used the ephedra controversy as the dagger to try and kill DSHEA. They worked in cahoots with federal government agencies, bought-off congressmen, greedy personal injury attorneys and private interest groups. On the surface, they held forth this screwy premise that the public needed to be protected from herbal products containing ephedra. They got it banned. Ironically, ephedrine is now tightly controlled by big pharma and only available with a prescription. But in retrospect, the real motivation was a different end game – that of using the ephedra argument to show weaknesses in DSHEA and hopefully get it overturned. While successful in their attack on ephedra, they failed in their true prime directive of taking down DSHEA. So in effect, they were trying to paint ephedra as the monster and DSHEA as an inadequate knight in shining armor unable to save us. Ironically, if ephedra were not banned under DSHEA, they would then be able to attack DSHEA and try and get it overturned. But it unexpectedly didn’t happen. Ephedra got banned and DSHEA survived.
Big pharma found out that it’s a great deal harder than they thought to undo a law here in America. This is especially true when you look at the fact that due to massive public need for better answers, alternative approaches to traditional medical care have now completely encroached on the big pharma monopoly. Disciplines like herbology, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), homeopathy and naturopathy can no longer be dismissed as nothing more than the wacky pursuits of some fringe hippies. They are all protected by DSHEA. Even drugstores themselves have aisles designated to dietary supplements. Due in a large part to a freer flow of global information in the Internet age, the shroud of big pharma has been lifted. People the world over are grasping for more information and alternatives to resigning themselves to ingesting synthetic lifetime drugs. People are realizing that there are better options as opposed to just the drugs big pharma wants to exclusively put in our faces.
Though they continue to wage a war against DSHEA, big pharma has adopted a new strategy of trumping DSHEA through international regulations. By way of something called “Codex”, they hope to make new laws that supercede DSHEA and, in effect, render it powerless.
The title “Codex” is short for “Codex Alimentarius” and Latin for “food and nutrition code”. Codex is a policy originally founded back in 1962 by the United Nations with the purpose of establishing international free trade standards for the world to follow. It was accepted and jointly administered by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) under the guise of protecting public safety by “standardizing” the way food, nutrients, vitamins and botanicals are made available to consumers. Now these groups (the WHO and the FAO) get together for meetings in which they set these standards.
The problem is that what may have originally started many years ago with some good intention has been corrupted. Codex standards have now become heavily influenced by multinational corporate special interest groups, which include the pharmaceutical industry, who sit on national committees and send delegates to their meetings. As a result of this heavy influence of corruption, decisions are made that protect the business end of corporate interests at the cost of human health. Codex recommendations are then put in motion by various means, ending up as acts or amendments that are then passed into law by governments.
This is going on right now right under our noses in such an insidious way that it virtually circumvents any public debate. That’s right… right here in America, by way of our own FDA. Codex is creeping up on us to control our access to nature. Codex decisions have the potential to globally influence our environment, along with every single bite of food and every swallow of drink we put in our bodies. If any nation neglects to follow these guidelines, they can be found guilty of setting up “trade barriers”. That’s when the almighty World Trade Organization (WTO) gets involved and assesses crippling financial penalties. Undestand that the WTO is the global commercial police force ensuring countries purchases from certain “corporations”, all in the name of “lowering trade barriers”. With that kind of power, the forces of the private interest groups are working at a breakneck pace to get the WTO to grant Codex the unique position as the one and only international food code that all countries, including the USA, must follow.
This entire “flimflam” operation is regarded by a number of experts and not just me, as a means for big pharma to eventually make all supplements available by prescription only. You see, big pharma’s fiscal ideal is to keep you alive with your disease in a chronic state, necessitating the drugs they provide and convince you that you need the rest of your life. The last thing they want you to do is find a cure, and most certainly not a natural cure they don’t control! Since cashing in on chronic disease is the main source of big pharma’s wealth, the last thing they want is for anyone to get hold of a cure from nature or even something as seemingly benign as a natural prevention… Are you beginning to get it?
Now to better understand big pharma’s role in all this, let’s take a step back and look at the state of things in America. With the FDA not allowing anyone to say that a natural substance sold as a dietary supplement can cure or treat your disease, clearly the pharmaceutical industry has our government protecting their interests. According to the FDA, only a drug that they’ve been PAID by big pharma to approve can be said to cure or treat your disease. As soon as you say that something natural can cure something, you’re basically committing a crime!
If we don’t stop them, here are just a few examples of the kind of new laws put forth through Codex by three major pharmaceutical companies which, if they have it their way, we’ll all be subjected to:
1. No herb, vitamin, mineral, or natural agent will be permitted to be freely sold for any therapeutic reason whatsoever.
2. Consumer access to dietary supplements will be limited to no more than the existing RDA. (Considered obsolete by most experts, the RDA is nothing more than the bare minimum of a vitamin or mineral required to prevent a deficiency disease, and certainly not the amount needed to maximize health.)
3. Dietary supplements without an RDA, which include the vast majority of dietary supplements on the market today, will be classified as drugs. (That means that popular substances like omega-3 fatty acids, glucosamine, bioflavonoids, and coenzyme Q10 will all require a doctor’s prescription to obtain.)
Sound bad? Now do you understand how in America our free access to nature and our legal rights under DSHEA are being threatened by Codex and the devious forces behind it? If you want to hear how bad things are going to get if we don’t put a stop to it, just listen to what’s gone on in several European countries, Canada and other nations where Codex policies rule. In these places, dietary supplements are even more restricted than drugs. Natural remedies are either not readily available, or available only by prescription. and at a huge additional cost. People who want to turn to herbal remedies for a potential cure or treatment or simply take a particular vitamin to enhance their state of being must resort to the black market! Now can you imagine being arrested and put in jail for buying something natural known for its therapeutic and health-promoting effects?
Imagine you want something simple like aloe vera to help heal, echinacea to get past a cold, gingko to help you with memory, or creatine for a good workout. Well now imagine being locked up like some kind of heroin addict or crackhead, just because you’re forced to procure them on the street! Sound crazy? Sound like science fiction? Well, I wish it were.
But it’s all true, because it all boils down to the money. Big pharma knows that the more natural health products people use, the fewer drugs they buy. It’s for reasons like this that they fear nature and want to control our access to it. Big pharma is now using Codex as a vehicle to protect profits that would otherwise be lost to some form of non-pharmaceutical integrative health care.
Some action groups are even accusing Codex of adopting a so-called “Napoleonic” approach bereft of Common Law; in other words, by this definition, anything under Codex that isn’t explicitly permitted would mean it’s strictly forbidden. This is in sharp contrast to Common Law considerations where we hold that anything not explicitly forbidden must be permitted. Again, it’s the difference between freedom versus no freedom.
As a result, if we don’t act, we can expect that therapeutic grade vitamins, minerals, and herbs will be eliminated from the free marketplace, with only a select few available for prescription and strictly controlled by big pharma. The bottom line is that we as Americans must not ignore what’s going on. If we do, and heaven forbid Codex is fully implemented in the U.S., even a civil rights-sized demonstration won’t get it reversed. In fact, since Codex is a global edict with punitive world trade sanctions built in, once adopted it will be irreversible. DSHEA will be a thing of the past. DSHEA will be trumped by Codex, and all the petitions, calls to congressmen, letters to senators, and marches on Washington won’t make a bit of difference.
The scariest thing is how slow and creepy this robbing of our freedom is taking place. The well-financed perpetrator is sneaking up on us at a painstakingly calculated and predetermined pace with the idea being that shrouded in darkness, we just wake up one morning and our free access to nature is gone and we’re helpless to do anything to change it back.
Big pharma is powerful, and they’ve grown rich on our backs and as a result of our own government selling us out. They’ve spent billions of dollars promoting their own interests and paying off members of Congress with things like generous lobbying donations and creating lucrative jobs for them after they retire from Congress. Big pharma’s paid lackeys litter Congress. They act like they’re representing the people and benevolently working for the government, while accepting huge campaign support from big pharma to basically throw public trust under the bus in deference to big pharma’s interests and their own personal greed.
And now it comes down to the mugger – their new foil called Codex. One of the most profound quotes I repeatedly refer to on the subject of the government influencing our health reads: “If the people let government decide what foods they eat and medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in a sorry state”. It’s a perfect and amazingly prophetic quote. What’s even more astonishing is that it was said by Thomas Jefferson back in the 1700s!!! What Jefferson said back then not only has withstood the test of time, but holds more truth today than at any other time in recorded human history!
Stay tuned, gang. You just know I’m going to be part of this fight, and it’s going to get ugly…
(From the February 2009 issue of Muscular Development)
DSHEA Under Attack… Again!
(By Carlon M. Colker, MD, FACN)
It’s been years since the trials and tribulations of ephedra. Back then, I suffered the indignity of being one of the most oft-cited ephedra researchers in the world. Metabolife, Ripped Fuel, Xenadrine RFA-1, Hydroxycut, etc. You name it and I did the research. As a result, I endured dozens of depositions, federal and state court testimony, and appearances before Congress, not to mention being named in numerous lawsuits! I was dropped from all of them without even a single case against me, but it all still sucked. In the end, ephedra was unjustifiably banned and taken out of the hands of the public and now apparently only safe if the drug company supplies it! It took me several years and the advantage of perspective at a distance to see who was really behind all that and why. In my view, the bottom line in all that crap was that it was the pharmaceutical industry simply using ephedra as the foil to try and overturn the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (also known as “DSHEA”). I’ll explain.
In America, our access to natural elements in the form of dietary supplements is perhaps the single most precious tool we have as free people to determine our own health, find our own natural cures and prevent illness and disease from killing us. It’s our right as Americans and in so being, there’s a law that protects our free access to nature’s healing power. It’s called DSHEA. It was passed into law in 1994 by way of thunderous support from the American people. DSHEA empowers Americans with the right to freely purchase dietary supplements without a prescription or limits, provided that the supplements have not been proven to be dangerous. It’s that simple. Companies and individuals have the legal right to sell dietary supplements and, thanks to DSHEA, we have every right to legally seek them out, possess them and take them at our own will.
Obviously, that angers the drug companies, who know all too well the power of nature. That’s because the only cures they control come from nature (take, for example, antibiotics like penicillin – it’s natural!). Well, big pharma wants to take free access to nature away. As a result, DSHEA continues to be repeatedly attacked by corrupted politicians, lawsuits and legislation driven by the pharmaceutical industry (also known as “big pharma”). I believe that big pharma wants to destroy DSHEA because it’s a direct competitive threat to their stranglehold on health care. That’s why they want to control it and that’s why they lobby so hard against DSHEA.
So, in my opinion, big pharma used the ephedra controversy as the dagger to try and kill DSHEA. They worked in cahoots with federal government agencies, bought-off congressmen, greedy personal injury attorneys and private interest groups. On the surface, they held forth this screwy premise that the public needed to be protected from herbal products containing ephedra. They got it banned. Ironically, ephedrine is now tightly controlled by big pharma and only available with a prescription. But in retrospect, the real motivation was a different end game – that of using the ephedra argument to show weaknesses in DSHEA and hopefully get it overturned. While successful in their attack on ephedra, they failed in their true prime directive of taking down DSHEA. So in effect, they were trying to paint ephedra as the monster and DSHEA as an inadequate knight in shining armor unable to save us. Ironically, if ephedra were not banned under DSHEA, they would then be able to attack DSHEA and try and get it overturned. But it unexpectedly didn’t happen. Ephedra got banned and DSHEA survived.
Big pharma found out that it’s a great deal harder than they thought to undo a law here in America. This is especially true when you look at the fact that due to massive public need for better answers, alternative approaches to traditional medical care have now completely encroached on the big pharma monopoly. Disciplines like herbology, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), homeopathy and naturopathy can no longer be dismissed as nothing more than the wacky pursuits of some fringe hippies. They are all protected by DSHEA. Even drugstores themselves have aisles designated to dietary supplements. Due in a large part to a freer flow of global information in the Internet age, the shroud of big pharma has been lifted. People the world over are grasping for more information and alternatives to resigning themselves to ingesting synthetic lifetime drugs. People are realizing that there are better options as opposed to just the drugs big pharma wants to exclusively put in our faces.
Though they continue to wage a war against DSHEA, big pharma has adopted a new strategy of trumping DSHEA through international regulations. By way of something called “Codex”, they hope to make new laws that supercede DSHEA and, in effect, render it powerless.
The title “Codex” is short for “Codex Alimentarius” and Latin for “food and nutrition code”. Codex is a policy originally founded back in 1962 by the United Nations with the purpose of establishing international free trade standards for the world to follow. It was accepted and jointly administered by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) under the guise of protecting public safety by “standardizing” the way food, nutrients, vitamins and botanicals are made available to consumers. Now these groups (the WHO and the FAO) get together for meetings in which they set these standards.
The problem is that what may have originally started many years ago with some good intention has been corrupted. Codex standards have now become heavily influenced by multinational corporate special interest groups, which include the pharmaceutical industry, who sit on national committees and send delegates to their meetings. As a result of this heavy influence of corruption, decisions are made that protect the business end of corporate interests at the cost of human health. Codex recommendations are then put in motion by various means, ending up as acts or amendments that are then passed into law by governments.
This is going on right now right under our noses in such an insidious way that it virtually circumvents any public debate. That’s right… right here in America, by way of our own FDA. Codex is creeping up on us to control our access to nature. Codex decisions have the potential to globally influence our environment, along with every single bite of food and every swallow of drink we put in our bodies. If any nation neglects to follow these guidelines, they can be found guilty of setting up “trade barriers”. That’s when the almighty World Trade Organization (WTO) gets involved and assesses crippling financial penalties. Undestand that the WTO is the global commercial police force ensuring countries purchases from certain “corporations”, all in the name of “lowering trade barriers”. With that kind of power, the forces of the private interest groups are working at a breakneck pace to get the WTO to grant Codex the unique position as the one and only international food code that all countries, including the USA, must follow.
This entire “flimflam” operation is regarded by a number of experts and not just me, as a means for big pharma to eventually make all supplements available by prescription only. You see, big pharma’s fiscal ideal is to keep you alive with your disease in a chronic state, necessitating the drugs they provide and convince you that you need the rest of your life. The last thing they want you to do is find a cure, and most certainly not a natural cure they don’t control! Since cashing in on chronic disease is the main source of big pharma’s wealth, the last thing they want is for anyone to get hold of a cure from nature or even something as seemingly benign as a natural prevention… Are you beginning to get it?
Now to better understand big pharma’s role in all this, let’s take a step back and look at the state of things in America. With the FDA not allowing anyone to say that a natural substance sold as a dietary supplement can cure or treat your disease, clearly the pharmaceutical industry has our government protecting their interests. According to the FDA, only a drug that they’ve been PAID by big pharma to approve can be said to cure or treat your disease. As soon as you say that something natural can cure something, you’re basically committing a crime!
If we don’t stop them, here are just a few examples of the kind of new laws put forth through Codex by three major pharmaceutical companies which, if they have it their way, we’ll all be subjected to:
1. No herb, vitamin, mineral, or natural agent will be permitted to be freely sold for any therapeutic reason whatsoever.
2. Consumer access to dietary supplements will be limited to no more than the existing RDA. (Considered obsolete by most experts, the RDA is nothing more than the bare minimum of a vitamin or mineral required to prevent a deficiency disease, and certainly not the amount needed to maximize health.)
3. Dietary supplements without an RDA, which include the vast majority of dietary supplements on the market today, will be classified as drugs. (That means that popular substances like omega-3 fatty acids, glucosamine, bioflavonoids, and coenzyme Q10 will all require a doctor’s prescription to obtain.)
Sound bad? Now do you understand how in America our free access to nature and our legal rights under DSHEA are being threatened by Codex and the devious forces behind it? If you want to hear how bad things are going to get if we don’t put a stop to it, just listen to what’s gone on in several European countries, Canada and other nations where Codex policies rule. In these places, dietary supplements are even more restricted than drugs. Natural remedies are either not readily available, or available only by prescription. and at a huge additional cost. People who want to turn to herbal remedies for a potential cure or treatment or simply take a particular vitamin to enhance their state of being must resort to the black market! Now can you imagine being arrested and put in jail for buying something natural known for its therapeutic and health-promoting effects?
Imagine you want something simple like aloe vera to help heal, echinacea to get past a cold, gingko to help you with memory, or creatine for a good workout. Well now imagine being locked up like some kind of heroin addict or crackhead, just because you’re forced to procure them on the street! Sound crazy? Sound like science fiction? Well, I wish it were.
But it’s all true, because it all boils down to the money. Big pharma knows that the more natural health products people use, the fewer drugs they buy. It’s for reasons like this that they fear nature and want to control our access to it. Big pharma is now using Codex as a vehicle to protect profits that would otherwise be lost to some form of non-pharmaceutical integrative health care.
Some action groups are even accusing Codex of adopting a so-called “Napoleonic” approach bereft of Common Law; in other words, by this definition, anything under Codex that isn’t explicitly permitted would mean it’s strictly forbidden. This is in sharp contrast to Common Law considerations where we hold that anything not explicitly forbidden must be permitted. Again, it’s the difference between freedom versus no freedom.
As a result, if we don’t act, we can expect that therapeutic grade vitamins, minerals, and herbs will be eliminated from the free marketplace, with only a select few available for prescription and strictly controlled by big pharma. The bottom line is that we as Americans must not ignore what’s going on. If we do, and heaven forbid Codex is fully implemented in the U.S., even a civil rights-sized demonstration won’t get it reversed. In fact, since Codex is a global edict with punitive world trade sanctions built in, once adopted it will be irreversible. DSHEA will be a thing of the past. DSHEA will be trumped by Codex, and all the petitions, calls to congressmen, letters to senators, and marches on Washington won’t make a bit of difference.
The scariest thing is how slow and creepy this robbing of our freedom is taking place. The well-financed perpetrator is sneaking up on us at a painstakingly calculated and predetermined pace with the idea being that shrouded in darkness, we just wake up one morning and our free access to nature is gone and we’re helpless to do anything to change it back.
Big pharma is powerful, and they’ve grown rich on our backs and as a result of our own government selling us out. They’ve spent billions of dollars promoting their own interests and paying off members of Congress with things like generous lobbying donations and creating lucrative jobs for them after they retire from Congress. Big pharma’s paid lackeys litter Congress. They act like they’re representing the people and benevolently working for the government, while accepting huge campaign support from big pharma to basically throw public trust under the bus in deference to big pharma’s interests and their own personal greed.
And now it comes down to the mugger – their new foil called Codex. One of the most profound quotes I repeatedly refer to on the subject of the government influencing our health reads: “If the people let government decide what foods they eat and medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in a sorry state”. It’s a perfect and amazingly prophetic quote. What’s even more astonishing is that it was said by Thomas Jefferson back in the 1700s!!! What Jefferson said back then not only has withstood the test of time, but holds more truth today than at any other time in recorded human history!
Stay tuned, gang. You just know I’m going to be part of this fight, and it’s going to get ugly…
(From the February 2009 issue of Muscular Development)
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