The Bioregional State's Bodily Integrity Principle Vs. Codex Alimentarius' WTO Vitamin Police
Bodily Integrity Vs. Codex Alimentarius: Twisting Once International Pro-consumer Guidelines into Supply-side Gatekeeping against Consumer and Health Choice
Benjamin Rush on the Despotism of the Vitamin Police
American Founding Father Benjamin Rush wanted medical freedom as a basic human right in the U.S. Constitution, arguing that "Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship . . .[T]o restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others, will be to constitute the Bastille of Medical Science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a Republic....The Constitution of this Republic should make special privilege for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom."
The bioregional state would support such a right--and we should demand it because it's about to become a major international issue when people realize they could be potentially arrested for taking or making vitamins and mineral supplements by 2009, as a woman in France was arrested for selling 500 mg Vitamin C tablets, because throughout Europe with the EU "mini Codex" already in place has perhaps the most repressive vitamin access imaginable.
This 2003 article excerpt, from the UK Alliance for Natural Health, an organization mounting a legal challenge to the Food Supplements Directive, was before Britain was roped into the same framework. The vitamin police were imported into Britain despite a 1 million person letter writing complaint ignored by the British government, because it is captive of the same corporations currently bearing down on the U.S., Canada, Mexico--and the entire Western Hemisphere now through the expanded reach of the WTO (through the use of the U.N.'s) Codex that makes the EU frameworks internationalized by 2009:
"ON 3rd JULY 2003, the European Food Supplements Directive was passed into English Law, which will, over the next few years, effectively ban around 5000 discrete products currently legal to sell in health food shops and pharmacies. This Directive has been devised and pushed forward by the unelected EU bureaucrats in order to "harmonize" the selling of health supplements throughout the EU, and was railroaded through the British Parliament by the Blair Government despite being rejected by the House of Lords. The way that the Government passed it was outrageous: just before the vote by the Standing Committee in the House of Commons, five Labour MPs who were going to vote against it were replaced by more obedient MPs. Even then, this directive was only passed by 8 votes to 6!
"So it seems that the European Parliament and the present UK Government are determined to pass the Food Supplements Directive despite the will of the people and even of MPs themselves. Why? Because it is the will of the EU Parliament which is very strongly influenced by the massive pharmaceutical companies in Europe. They are the only ones that will financially gain from the destruction of the health supplement industry. After all, people who take responsibility for their own health by taking supplements need less drugs because they are healthier.
"It is ironic that the Malnutrition Advisory Group has recently released a report showing that about 2 million people in the UK(!), including 60% of hospital patients, are not getting adequate nutrition and they admit that this is severally affecting their health and ability to heal. Of course, they don't mention supplements because they are still under the false and dangerous impression that this fictitious thing called a "well-balanced diet" exists that can adequately supply all the nutrients that the body needs. Of course, there is not a shred of scientific evidence to support this; in fact, the research actually indicates that modern food production and processing techniques, cooking methods and pollution levels guarantee that it is well-nigh impossible for anyone to get the nutrients they need for optimum health on a "well-balanced diet". (And if you can't get optimum nutrition using ingredients from the supermarket, how on earth are you going to find it in a disgusting NHS hospital slop canteen!) Given this terrible state of modern nutrition, it is astonishing that our governments are trying to move legislation towards a vastly reduced availability of nutritional supplements. What is going on?
"Many of us have been protesting about these proposals for the past five years, writing letters to our MPs and MEPs, signing million signature petitions and even marching on Parliament here in London. Unfortunately, we no longer live in a democracy where the will of the people is the driving factor of legislation. The EU Parliament is not interested in personal freedom, or even personal health… only control and more control. And they have tried to justify this assault on our rights to take supplements on the grounds of our safety, even though health supplements have a safety record second to none — see LaLeva's Safety of Dietary Supplements and Comparative Safety Graph. And given their incredible safety, it is rather odd that the tabloid newspapers have been running sensational headlines over the past few years on the dangers of nutritional supplements. (I wonder who is behind those media campaigns?)
"Already, the supplement market in Germany and Norway are severely controlled, and it is illegal, for example, to buy Vitamin C over 200mg in strength because it is considered by Brussels to be unnecessary, although of course, it is very necessary for the population to continue to buy cigarettes and alcohol as they are very healthy for governments' bank accounts. I have just heard (10/3/04) from a very reliable source that a woman has been arrested in France for selling 500mg tablets of Vitamin C because in that country doses of that strength are now considered medicinal! (There is absolutely no safety issue with Vitamin C and you can freely buy 1000mg tablets here in the UK and US at the moment… I take 3 a day.) Soon, these sorts of controls will be pan-European, and you will only be able to buy from a small and bland list of ineffective, inorganic supplements and in doses that the EU diktat considers appropriate. Many innovative products and companies will simply disappear, and it will become much harder for each of us to take responsibility for our health."
And so the WTO's Codex would 'harmonize' disharmoniously with current U.S., Canadian, and many other countries in the Western Hemisphere's more locally representative laws that benefit the consumer health freedom access to vitamins and minerals--forcing all countries internationally involved in the WTO to remove their pro-consumer and health freedom access legislation, like the EU.
Below are links to two interesting short documentaries about the current invasive, consumer repressive despotism of Codex Alimentarius, supposedly to be institutionalized across multiple nations by 2009. If despotism is defined as:
1. the rule of a despot; the exercise of absolute authority.
2. absolute power or control; tyranny.
3. an absolute or autocratic government.
4. a country ruled by a despot.
--then the Codex Alimentarius is a global despotism in its current form.
Starting innocuously enough in the early 1960s as a pro-consumer U.N. protocol for standards to assure healthy and nutritious foods for developing countries by establishing international baselines for health standards, it has instead by the 1990s been corporatized into international prohibition and sales standards. The touchy point is its ongoing attempt, by 2009 it is said, to outlaw certain health products internationally used as natural alternatives to expensive (and barely serviceable--because it kills approximately 750,000 a year in the United States) hospital medicine. The Codex presumes to outlaw the body's natural building blocks--vitamins and minerals--a far cry from setting 'health standards.'
The current iterations of the Codex are a complete turnaround from its conception purpose, of encouraging health standard baselines, which have been twisted into an enforcement arm granting itself the power internationally to license and ban commodities.
Night of the Living Dead Vitamin Police
The Codex has turned into the "night of the living vitamin police" once more, because these policies were soundly trounced by citizen activism over a decade ago, and here they come to eerie life from the grave through the World Trade Organization, to shore up private monopolies of more expensive health treatments from competition with cheaper and unpatentable vitamins and minerals that are a gift of nature and the very way our bodies work.
One documentary gets into the guilty secret of how this 'consumptive heresthetics' works, mentioning it is very reminiscent of when the FDA simultaneously outlawed 'free' and naturally occurring L-tryptophan amino acid as a supplement (widely used as a nutritional treatment against depression) effectively criminalizing the human body's own neurotransmitters! This was in order to force sales of risky and dangerous Prozac recently introduced as a 'corporate substitute' to tryptophan based neurotransmitter deficiency issues. Obviously, the human body instead of the corporations knew best: later of course Prozac was withdrawn in Europe after multiple tens of thousands of deaths and suicides--though L-tryptophan still is kept from being a supplement in the U.S., and still in the U.S. Prozac is there.
Prozac is made by Eli Lilly, whom George H. W. Bush has been associated with for most of his life on the board of Directors. So while it was banned in Europe due to these suicidal tendencies being expanded, in the U.S. Ely Lilly corruptly saw that it was kept in circulation:
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INSET ON PROZAC
Eli Lilly Knew Prozac Causes Suicides, Violence - FDA Closed Both Eyes
Categories
Health
Pharma
Prozac, called fluoxetine by generic name, is a psychiatric drug prescribed to over 50 million people including millions of children. The drug was linked to increased suicides and violence as early as 1988, in a recently emerged document. Apparently the evaluation was known to Prozac's maker Eli Lilly as early as the 'eighties, but was never even given to the FDA.
This is the preoccupying picture that emerged just days ago, as the British Medical Journal passed on documents to the FDA which it had received by an anonymous whistleblower.
Can such a "head in the sand" policy be characterized as merely overzealous business practice, or is it an indication of something much more devastating? Eli Lilly is one of the multinational drug companies that have developed the "Texas Medication Algorithm Project", which is part of George Bush II's sweeping program to test kids at school as well as pregnant mothers for "psychiatric disorders". Prozac is one of the drugs that are to be given to kids who don't meet the evaluating personnel's standards of "normal" behaviour.
Eli Lilly is right where the important decisions are made. In July 2001, Gerald Radke, a former marketing director for Eli Lilly, became Deputy Director of Pennsylvania's Department of Public Welfare’s Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. Rathke, who is one of the major proponents of the universal testing and medication program, had previously been "on loan" to head a mental health advocacy group, NAMI or National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, which is funded by ... Eli Lilly and other pharmaceutical manufacturers.
When recently, antidepressant drugs received FDA mandated warning labels, Prozac wasn't on the list and indeed, in Europe the drug has been called "safe for children" for years. Recently, the whole FDA approval procedure for drugs has been questioned as being too industry friendly, and apparently with good reason. After recent revelations of heart attack risk for the users of several "new generation" painkillers - Vioxx, Bextra, Celebrex and others, the FDA's policy of sustaining the profits of pharmaceutical industry, in sharp contrast with its official mission of protecting patients from dangerous pharmaceutical drugs, has been publicly questioned.
Not only the drug approval process seems to be slanted in favor of industry. Even the food supply has been compromised with products such as artificial sweeteners and genetically modified plants, animals and bacteria that are by no means innocuous. While aspartame for instance has brought great profits to the industry, the FDA plain refuses to look at the numerous adverse reaction reports. FDA field agents are reported to block people from even reporting events, because "aspartame could not cause such a reaction".
The same is true for cholesterol lowering statin drugs, where apparently frequent reports of muscle pains, memory loss and other side effects just don't seem to make it into the FDA's system, despite being fairly widespread. The pains associated with statin drug use may even have led to the overuse of painkillers - those recently found to cause an increase of heart attacks.
Meanwhile, the FDA is complaining that it does not have sufficient means to control dangerous food supplements and is promoting stringent legislation on those nutrient rich products.
What has the world come to?
- - -
Journal hands over Prozac papers
(original on BBC news)
Confidential papers on anti-depressant drug Prozac that went missing during a murder case have been handed to the US drug regulator by a UK medical journal.
The documents, belonging to Eli Lilly, the makers of Prozac, included details of clinical trials of the drug, the British Medical Journal said.
The documents reportedly went missing after the relatives of the victims of Joseph Wesbecker started legal action.
Mr Wesbecker, who was on Prozac, shot eight people dead in 1989 in the US.
Another 12 people were injured during the shooting spree at a printing plant in Louisville, Kentucky.
Data
The 47-year-old then shot himself.
In 1994, the relatives brought a civil case against Eli Lilly.
The company subsequently won the case but was later forced to admit that it had made a secret settlement with the plaintiffs during the trial, which meant that the verdict was invalid, the BMJ reported.
Dr Richard Kalpit, the clinical reviewer at the US Food and Drug Administration, the US drugs regulator, who approved the drug, told the BMJ he was not given the data included in the documents.
"These data are very important. If this report was done by Lilly or for Lilly, it was their responsibility to report it to us and to publish it."
Recent research has suggested children who use Prozac are at greater risk of suicide...
...
Britain set for clash with Europe over ban on Prozac for under-18s
Europe's drugs watchdog has banned Prozac and other modern antidepressants for under-18s because of safety fears, putting it on a collision course with Britain's drugs regulator. Antidepressants increase suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts among children and adolescents, and should not be used to treat depression, the scientific panel of the European Medicines Agency (Emea) said. Including Prozac in the ban clashes with the stance taken by Britain's drugs regulator 16 months ago. Prozac is the only antidepressant that doctors can prescribe to children in Britain, following a safety review in 2003.
FDA accused of suppressing drug safety information
Here's a report on the FDA that could only come from outside the United States. I'm reading to you from The Independent, a British newspaper, that says, "Vital data on prescription medication found in millions of British homes has been suppressed by the powerful U.S. drug regulators, even though the information could potentially save lives." An investigation by The Independent states that, under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, the American Food and Drug Administration routinely conceals information it considers commercially sensitive, leaving medical specialists unable to assess the true risks.
...
Here is a comment on the matter of SSRI antidepressants from a recent communication of the ALLIANCE FOR HUMAN RESEARCH PROTECTION (AHRP)
Dr. Graham notes that the FDAs proposed new label for SSRI antidepressants cites a "suicidality" rate of one to two percent, but a senior FDA official acknowledged in September that that number was based upon drug trials that "failed to capture most of the reactions of suicidality." But, he points out, the finding in an alternative trial, Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS)--"the actual rate was somewhere around seven or eight percent," which, as he says, is an incredibly substantive difference from the proposed FDA numbers in the warning label.
Indeed, in the TADS experiment, there were 7 suicide attempts--6 in the Prozac group, one in the placebo group. The rate for adverse events involving deliberate harm (to self or others) in children in the Prozac group was 12%,additionally suicide-related events in the Prozac group reached 8.26%. More than twice the rate in the placebo group: 5.36% and 3.57% respectively. [1]
Evidence of the hazards of Prozac and the other SSRI antidepressants that had been hidden for decades - or deliberately miscoded - is coming to light: the hazards include severe withdrawal symptoms - which is evidence of drug dependency; mania; violence; suicide; and cardiac abnormalities. Additionally, children prescribed an SSRI are at risk of decreased growth and an unusual high incidence of conversion from drug-induced mania to manic-depression (bipolar) - previously a rare diagnosis in children.
All of these hazards continue to be downplayed by the FDA and leading psychopharmacologists who have considerable (mostly undisclosed) financial stakes in the pharmaceutical industry. Most of the experts usually cited in the press have tested the drugs in clinical trials but failed to disclose in published reports the negative findings, hazardous - even lethal - adverse events that occurred in the trials. Company officials and psychiatrists from prestigious medical institutions - who are paid consultants or recipients of grants from drug manufacturers - have tainted the scientific literature. They have misled prescribing physicians with reassuring, but unsupportable claims that the drugs were safe and effective when the drugs have failed to demonstrate a clinically significant benefit, but posed clinically significant risks of harm:
When questioned by about the TADS findings by Psychiatric News, Dr. Graham Emslie, one of the lead investigators of the trial acknowledged: "Patients receiving fluoxetine alone had the highest risk of experiencing a harm-related event, compared with those receiving placebo. [2]
1. Fluoxetine, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy,and Their Combination for Adolescents With Depression Treatment for Adolescents With Depression Study (TADS) Randomized Controlled Trial, JAMA, August 18, 2004, Vol 292, 807-820, Table 3.
2. Jim Rosack. Drug/CBT Combo Effective In Treating Depressed Youth, Psychiatric News September 3, 2004, Volume 39 Number 17 © 2004 American Psychiatric Association. Online at: http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/39/17/1
Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav
212-595-8974
veracare@ahrp.org
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As discussed in earlier entries, letting corruptible large scale national organizations adjudicate risk for multiple local publics is innately a flawed method of crafting risk regulations. And a corrupt FDA (and EPA) really depend entirely upon corporate honesty in testing, of which there is little being manufactured, so the public FDA/EPA actually does little if any independent testing. Their federal budgets are for reviewing corporate spoonfed data tests, which have been shown to be completely fraudulent 'spoof research' sometimes. This centralization of material risk adjudication nationally (or in the Codex internationally) leads to a process divorced from local consumer geographic risk experiences, and instead, full of international corporate risk producing politics attempting to protect themselves.
The Codex is just one example of this. The current process of material risk adjudication is broken because the scale of who adjudicates consumer risk properly is at the local geographic level, instead of the national level, much less the international WTO. In the current frameworks of risk adjudication, systemic health risks are about all that is institutionalized and underwritten by political cronies making fast with public health. The ongoing 'sweet misery' of aspartame poisoning, courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld, is proof enough for this over and over. The L-tryptophan outlawing, simultaneous with the hocking of Prozac without true testing, is another example of high level corruption. The ongoing stalling due to conflicts of interest in the the vaccine connected autism epidemic is another 'sick' example, no pun intended.
Current versions of the Codex are adamantly even more repressive, anti-consumer, and anti-health rights ironically because the consumer already won the battle. The consumers in the United States and elsewhere made their voice known by the 1990s on the issue. They want to have legal protections for right of access to cheap health care alternatives, via vitamin/mineral supplements. Sparked by their attempt to remove these health choices, allopathic medical-drug corporations found a 'health freedom' movement of consumers on their hands--and health freedom is something the United States has never had for 100 or more years due to the consolidation and winnowing of medical practice through the influence of the Rockefeller foundations.
The Codex documentaries show by the early 1990s, this sudden health freedom movement underway in the United States successfully stopped a 'mini' version of "the vitamin police" being created. Legality of having vitamins and mineral supplements was secured via a huge consumer/producer outcry.
However, the documentaries go on to show that the same losing drug corporations--still busy poisoning us with forced limited choices and poorly tested 'rubberstamped' safety labels--are the same ones working on the international level to force their policies from the outside in, now. They are attempting to get around massive public outcry by foisting the same policies that lost through a pro-corporate treaty framework.
Even though the "vitamin police" was rejected on a national level, it is currently attempting to come back from the dead on an international level through the WTO.
Bodily Integrity vs. Codex Alimentarius
Codex Alimentarius's current versions, in terms of the bioregional state, cross the 'bodily integrity' line "that government shall not pass." The fuller quote of bioregional state principles, from Toward a Bioregional State's Ecological Bill of Rights, says in part:
"Attempts of some to pressure government to enforce certain moralities to regulate internal bodily issues are forms of bodily tyranny that break the skin barrier that government shall not pass. The Constitution of Sustainability shall assure bodily integrity through upholding bodily rights, instead of demoting them."
The bioregional state is of course is pro-consumer rights, and pro-local risk adjudication since most risk is experienced geographically particularly in pollution issues. The Codex Alimentarius in its current versions is anti-consumer rights and completely uninterested that multiple local geographies have already made their statement that they wanted access to health alternatives that are innately part of their own bodies (supplements). Thus the Codex's present twisted framework is a profoundly anti-consumer, anti-health care treaty beholden to corporate interests attempting to criminalize cheap and less risky forms of medicinal choices and practices in vitamins and mineral supplements.
Your Increasingly Nutritionally Useless Food
As an earlier entry, "SUPPLY VERSUS DEMAND: Veggies, Soil, Pesticides/Herbicides, and Your Increasingly Nutritionally Useless Food," has shown, industrialized agriculture strategies destroy the health of the soil, and lead to breeding crops for anti-consumer goals. They have caused a huge documentable drop in the vitamin and mineral content of basic foods over the 20th century and into the 21st.
In that earlier entry, amongst other points:
According to data collected by the USDA, non-organic vegetables have fewer vitamins and minerals than they did 50 years ago. On an overall scale of all produce tested, protein has declined by six percent, iron has declined 15 percent, vitamin C has dropped 20 percent, and riboflavin has fallen by 38 percent. An analysis of the nutritional drops was published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition and suggests the loss is due to the increased cultivation of crops that were bred for high growth and production and not for nutritional value.
So, when you intentionally breed for more quantity, quality and even nutritional content has suffered. Mix this with soil demineralization, the very building blocks of plant growth and quality, then mineral and vitamin supplements are probably required simply because they help people keep up with what has been steadily eroded from their increasingly industrialized food materials. Food has internally changed in quality and content over much of the industrialized agricultural world, despite maintaining an innocuously unchanged look. This is why the organic sector is booming--while major industrial agricultural food corporations want to avoid selling pro-consumer items:
Codex frameworks attempting to "pull an FDA" and pressure supply-side forced sales by attempting to stop health freedom choices would be categorically disallowed within the bioregional state. It is the watershed first that has primary jurisdiction exclusively on material risk politics in the bioregional state, instead of the federal and state governments. Local geographical risk adjudication is one of its main principles. This is widely seen already in practice--in different local counties deciding on their own to ban GMOs, or in different states wanting to ban Monsanto's risky cancer causing and life shortening (for cattle) rBGH growth hormone for bilking out more milk production, for instance.
In the bioregional state's Ecological Bill of Rights:
Article 29
Section 1.
The Constitution of Sustainability shall support bodily integrity of all citizens and species. There are bodily rights beyond which all government shall keep from challenging and instead shall maintain them, running the gamut from environmental pollution issues that impinge on bodily integrity, to food issues, to commodity monitoring, to surveillance, and to abortion. The Constitution of Sustainability is based on bodily rights and bodily integrity assured through these rights. Government is limited to a social operation regulating only spaces and activities between individuals for sustainability and for human rights instead of regulating or having any jurisdiction on internal bodily activities or personal decisions about one's own body. Attempts of some to pressure government to enforce certain moralities to regulate internal bodily issues are forms of bodily tyranny that break the skin barrier that government shall not pass. The Constitution of Sustainability shall assure bodily integrity through upholding bodily rights, instead of demoting them.
...
Section 6.
Citizens have the right to unadulterated, healthful, organic foods. Citizens have the right to unadulterated environment, air, water, and earth.
Add to that citizens have the right to unadulterated, healthful vitamins and minerals supplements--because they are innately parts of our own bodily integrity, and to attempt to outlaw them (like the FDA outlawed our very own neurotransmitters, in their tryptophan origins!) is hubris and despotism.
HERE ARE THE LINKS to these two documentaries on Codex Alimentarius:
1.
We Become Silent - The Last Days Of Health Freedom
28 min 37 sec - Apr 6, 2006
International award-winning filmmaker Kevin P. Miller of Well TV announced the release of a new documentary about the threat to medical freedom of choice. 'We Become Silent: The Last Days of Health Freedom' details the ongoing attempts by multinational pharmaceutical interests and giant food companies--in concert with the WTO, the WHO and others--to limit the public’s access to herbs, vitamins and other therapies. 'We Become Silent’ is narrated by Dame Judi Dench, the noted UK actress who has won multiple Golden Globe awards, an Oscar, and a Tony for her on-stage work, in addition to dozens of other honors throughout her prestigious career.
posted by Mark at 3:29 PM
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