Why Bill C-420 Saves Our Supplements & More!
..."The demand for regulation of food-based supplements with medicinal properties is a monumental deception. Just follow the money - someone is obviously going to make a killing (pun intended) if Bill C-420 does not pass or the pro-Pharma lobby succeeds in instituting that so-called Third Category."...
The following succinctly describes why we should support Bill C-420 and avoid the Third Category. As usual it has been embellished with appropriate links, such as the, CBC conversation with Dr. Angell, referred in the body...
Please post and e-blast far and wide.
Chris Gupta
Why Bill C-420 Saves Our Supplements
and the Third Category Sinks Them
by Carolyn Dean, MD, ND and Helke Ferrie
Common Ground Magazine: www.commonground.ca. April 1, 2005
North America is run by Big Business and Big Pharma is the biggest business. We wonder why drugs that kill are allowed to be heavily marketed, while safe supplements are being lambasted by poison press articles. Big Pharma, which manufactures drugs as well as all the cancer and chronic-disease causing pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, controls most of life and death in North America, indeed this business is larger than the car industry. The more people use dietary supplements the less they need drugs: it's that simple. No wonder, that recently Hoffman-LaRoche was fined close to a billion dollars for artificially creating a shortage of the un-patentable vitamin B3 raw material in order to increase sales of their patented cholesterol-lowering drugs; the vitamin is absolutely safe and more effective than the synthetic drug. Recent polls show that 60 to 70% of North Americans now use dietary supplements and complementary medicine. *
Big Pharma is lobbying heavily to keep our supplements in the drug category and prevent the passing of Bill C-420 which had the unanimous support of all parties on second reading on March 9th. If Bill C-420 becomes law, it would reverse the illegal regulation that was enforced, without parliamentary debate or public knowledge, in January 2004: it made our food-based supplements into drugs, thereby requiring their assessment and availability to be controlled by Health Canada in the same way as pharmaceuticals. Health Canada's track record regarding safety is by now so abysmal as to make Health Canada itself into the greatest health hazard of all. Worst of all, the amendments to the legislation governing Health Canada, which are currently being considered by our government, would remove all accountability for their regulatory process. With regard to supplement regulation this would mean that the public would not be privy to the reasons why any given supplement was deemed "toxic, or what "scientific standard or source was used to determine maximum and minimum dosages. For details, see the February 2005 publication, Ill-Health Canada by Michael McBane published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (613-233-1458 ccpa@policyalternatives.ca )Remember Dr. Shiv Chopra? He was and is Health Canada's most severe critic, having been employed by them for almost 40 years; he saved Canadians from having carcinogenic bovine growth hormone secretly added to our milk supply. In his view, Health Canada's regulatory system routinely relies on what he refers to as "tobacco science which industry hacks produce by manipulating the data in the interest of profits. For a magisterial overview of this world of deception we recommend The Truth About The Drug Companies (Random, 2004) by Marcia Angell, the former editor of the world's most prestigious medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine.
Listen to:
A Conversation with Dr. Marcia Angell, author of The Truth about the Drug Companies (Sept 12/04)
Dietary supplements are safer than the food chain. MP Colin Carrie stated that fact in parliament on March 9, 2005 in support of Bill C-420.
Critics of Bill C-420 argue that we need good manufacturing practices enforced. Well, the regulatory authorities handling supplements ignore the overwhelming mainstream scientific evidence when it comes to supplements marketed by Big Pharma, such as the known neurotoxin and carcinogen aspartame. The stated primary intent of the Food and Drugs Act was to protect the public against food adulteration, yet adulteration with known toxic synthetic substances is now the norm in the food industry: nobody is protecting the public against fast foods that were shown in the documentary SuperSize Me to lead to a 25 pound weight gain in one month, elevated cholesterol and triglycerides, dangerously elevated liver enzymes and blood pressure.
Do we really want vitamins, minerals, and probiotics evaluated by those same regulators who consistently bend to industry demands and allow these toxic supplements into our food? Can these regulators be trusted to even know the difference between what supports and what destroys health?Two audits of Health Canada carried out in the 1980's bears this fact out when on each occasion they exposed Health Canada for wasting too much time, money and personnel regulating the health food industry which gives Health Protection the least amount of problems regarding health and safety issues and too little attention towards "Big Pharma" where the greatest problems arise in death and damage. Since 1997 to the present - 14 drugs and a vaccine have had to be removed form the market because of death and damage. - Croft Woodruff
Until we have a regulatory system that works, abides by the published and verifiable scientific evidence, is fully transparent and accountable to the public in its decisions, and cannot be intimidated by Big Pharma, it would be suicide to allow the products of our supplement industry to be "regulated by that oxymoron known as Health Canada.
Everyone seems to agree that Bill C-420 is important because it would repeal sections 3.1 and 3.2 of the Food and Drugs Act. These sections prohibit telling the truth in informational and advertising as published by mainstream science about the effectiveness of food supplements in the treatments of a wide range of health conditions, all of which are the so-called Schedule A: it includes most known diseases. Schedule A is enforceable under criminal law, as happened to the Strauss Herbal Company recently - Health Canada lost. The courts can understand medical evidence Health Canada apparently can't.See: HEALTH CANADA - ELEMENTS OF COERCION DEALT CRUSHING BLOW
In a new book, Death by Modern Medicine, Dr. Carolyn Dean reports for example, that the billion dollar drug advertising machine is supported by a mere 6% of actual, verifiable scientific research. Only 10 to 20% of all standard drug therapy, surgery, and chemotherapy, which form the basis of the entire modern medical system, have been found to be supported by any published science. These findings come from the leading peer reviewed medical journals. *
See: The Medical Mafia rules:The public is dying to the tune of 106,000 per year due to properly prescribed drugs in hospital and 784,000 annually due to modern medical practices. These are the reported U.S. figures which, according to former FDA director David Kessler, are bound to be much more numerous. If the most heavily regulated industry on the planet the drug industry - is killing so many people, plainly regulation doesn't work. The situation has become so absurd that the US government has established a new, independent office for drug safety charged with overseeing the overseers, namely the FDA's drug regulators. In Canada we continue to maintain the illusion that Health Canada is protecting the public interest. The really big question is: Why do supplements, proven a thousand times over in the vast medical literature to be safe and effective, need to be regulated like drugs, which are acknowledged even by their manufacturers to be toxic? Supplements have never needed the medical tap dance known as "weighing the benefits against potential harm which every doctor executes routinely when dealing with the drugs of his trade.
The demand for regulation of food-based supplements with medicinal properties is a monumental deception. Just follow the money - someone is obviously going to make a killing (pun intended) if Bill C-420 does not pass or the pro-Pharma lobby succeeds in instituting that so-called Third Category.
Big Pharma is poised to take over the dietary supplement industry. The larger companies in the dietary supplement industry are being wined and dined (literally) and told how lucky they are to get a place at the table with the Big Boys. They, too, can have publicly traded companies andmake big money. What ever happened to real quality, the common good, real health, and freedom of consumer choice? Health Canada's own business impact survey coolly predicted that 80 % of small- to medium-sized businesses will be bankrupted by the current regulatory environment that legislates food supplements as drugs. In the full knowledge of their own survey, Health Canada went ahead and legislated dietary supplements as drugs anyway also totally against the will of Canadians: at least 245,000 Canadians signed petitions that were taken to parliament to register your desire to have supplements regulated as foods.
This Third Category looks and sounds so sweetly fair, yet it would have the same negative impact on smaller businesses and on the availability of innovative products. The net effect would be the systematic decline in quality and availability of dietary supplements. Those smaller businesses are forced into bankruptcies or selling out to larger companies which are within the Big Business network, not because their products are unsafe or inferior.
Market control is the name of the game in Big Business and its agenda is to turn the health food industry into a carbon copy of Big Pharma. It wants to market synthetic supplements at low doses, as recommended by the official reports created by Big Pharma's "scientists for Codex, that international trade commission which signed agreements with the World Trade Organization to ensure its guidelines will be enforced by the WTO's (secret) courts, when necessary. Canada is a member of both Codex and the WTO. Codex started out as a United Nations commission affiliated with the World Health Organization which took control of Codex in 1995. So, while the UN does not and never could enforce anything Codex does, the WTO can and will.
The Third Category option does not alter this fact because it is at its core fraudulent: the Natural Health Products Regulations tell us plainly on page 1573 that: "Natural Health Products are drugs at the level of the Foods And Drugs Act. So, while these regulations also state on page 1574 that "the NHP definition allows for a full range of health claims, Health Canada reserves the right under the Foods and Drugs Act to bring any natural product under its drug regulations as they did with Vitamin K and Folic Acid. The former is prescription only, the latter requires it for dosages above 1 mg for no scientifically supported reason whatsoever. The Third Category is an illusion because the fine print further ensures that the current medical paradigm remains inviolate: Health Canada and the NIH in the USA both are mandated only to investigate dietary supplements for prevention of deficiencies, NOT for therapeutic use! In both countries the notion that a person, without consulting a doctor, may decide what works best to restore health, is absolute heresy.
Bill C-420 would protect natural health products from Health Canada control by making it impossible for this agency to exercise its arbitrary powers, sweep aside scientific facts, ignore public demand, and protect us all against our wills and to do so regardless of the missing body-count. However, this is only step one: after we have succeeded in protecting our dietary supplements through Bill C-420, then we must chip away at Codex and protect our supplements from the interlocking international trade agreements, including the WTO. Anything that you may have read (usually emanating from Health Canada) about saving food supplements from the power of Codex by putting them into the drugs category, is totally untrue.
Dr. Dean attended the last Codex meeting in November 2004 and knows first-hand that Codex is happy to support genetically engineered foods, irradiation and synthetic vitamin E. Indeed, they want the world to take only Centrumthe synthetic multiple vitamin that our bodies are unable to metabolize and which, in addition to doing nothing for a person's health, causes serious clogging problems in our sewage treatment plants. When supplements are defined as foods, they are at least out of the reach of Codex as long as international trade agreements don't kick in: Codex can regulate international trade of pineapples or maple syrup, but it can't tell Jamaicans and Canadians how much of these to consume at home. A few days in Germany will prove where we are headed without Bill C-420: there are no health foods stores as we know them, no vitamin shops, no free access to useful potencies in vitamins need for therapeutic effects.
What do you need do? Run - don't just walk! - to your nearest MPs office and demand that for your own good, for the public's good, and for the MPs good (their personal and political longevity) they must vote for Bill C-420 and absolutely not allow any bastardization of this bill into that phony Third Category. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians made it clear to Health Canada in 1997 that we do not want that Third Category, that we no longer trust our regulatory system, and that we want food-based supplements to stay in the food category where they belong. We must make it clear to them again.
The sources on all acts mentioned in this article are in two new books:Death by Modern Medicine by C. Dean MD, ND and T. Tuck, March 2005, call 613-968-3007, greg@curesnaturally.com; retailers: www.tucksdiscountvitamins.com, practitioners: www.curesnaturally.com wholesalers: www.cureswholesale.com.
Helke Ferrie's Dispatches from the War Zone of Environmental Health, Kos, 2004, 1-877-567-6337 or 519-927-1049, Helke@inetsonic.com, visit www.kospublishing.com
posted by Chris Gupta on Tuesday March 15 2005
updated on Saturday September 24 2005URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2005/03/15/why_bill_c420_saves_our_supplements_more.htm
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