USA - The War on Drugs, The Continuation

[robertone]

Who ever expected that the [US] Goverment would come to their sences regarding the War on Drugs, might be dead wrong after all. It looks like that soon we won't stand alone in our struggle against drugs prohibition and procecution anymore. But this next step distresses me even more then I already was... Soon we won't have any freedom left!

When it comes to health freedom, this is the FDA's end game. A new FDA "guidance" document, published on the FDA's website, reveals plans to reclassify virtually all vitamins, supplements, herbs and even vegetable juices as FDA-regulated drugs. Massage oils and massage rocks will be classified as "medical devices" and require FDA approval. The document is called Docket No. 2006D-0480. Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.

The FDA is accepting public comments on the docket until April 30th. They tried to sneak this under the radar, but word got out and now the natural health community is up in arms over this rule. If you wish to protect your access to nutritional supplements, herbs, essential oils, homeopathic medicine or any other "complementary" or "alternative" modality, it is crucial that you take action to post your comments with the FDA right now and write your representatives in Washington to put a stop to this outrageous effort to destroy natural medicine. (And be sure to really write them. Just sending an email has virtually no impact compared to writing a physical letter in your own words.)

This move by the FDA is designed to once and for all destroy the 1994 DSHEA law that has made supplements "legal" while eliminating nutritional supplements and natural medicine from the United States, ensuring monopoly profits and control by drug companies and the FDA. It is the latest action item by the FDA / Big Pharma conspiracy that will not stop until health freedom has been abolished, drug companies rule the nation, and every citizen is diagnosied with a fictitious disease and drugged up on monopoly-priced pharmaceuticals.

FDA "experts" will decide what's a drug or medical device
Under these proposed guidelines, FDA "experts" (the same corrupt officials who reapproved Vioxx after it killed over 50,000 Americans) will decide whether herbs, supplements, vitamins or simple devices like massage stones are to be regulated as drugs and medical devices. If the FDA experts, in their infinite wisdom, decide that these things are to be reclassified, they will essentially be outlawed, stripped from the shelves, and regulated out of existence. Anyone who dares to manufacture, promote or sell such products may be branded a criminal and rounded up by armed FDA agents who have a well established history of suppressing natural medicine.

I've documented much of the criminal history of the FDA in my recent book, Natural Health Solutions and the Conspiracy to Keep You From Knowing About Them, which suddenly seems even more relevant today than when I wrote it. In that book, I documented the FDA ordered book burnings, the raids on vitamin shops, the kidnapping of natural health practitioners, the threats, intimidation and oppression tactics that have been used to suppress natural medicine for nearly a hundred years now. And now, with this CAM Products Regulation effort, the FDA is about to deal a final, fatal blow to the alternative medicine industry, outlawing nutritional supplements, functional foods, homeopathy and natural therapies all at once.

This is not a drill. It really is time to be alarmed. Nothing else I've written about this year is as important as this sinister plot to destroy natural medicine and force the American population to resort to dangerous prescription medications sold at monopoly prices under a system of medical tyranny.

Your access to vitamins, supplements, herbs, and even energy medicine modalities is now directly threatened, and you have until April 30 to make your voice heard.

Action items
First, read the document yourself. Click here for the PDF version.

Take special care to notice the following text, taken directly from the FDA's own document: (italicized text is from the FDA, with my own translation following)

"...a product used in a CAM therapy or practice may be subject to regulation as a biological product, cosmetic, drug, device, or food (including food additives and dietary supplements) under the act or the PHS Act. Second, neither the act nor the PHS Act exempts CAM products from regulation."

Translation: Anything used in any system of medicine may now be regulated as a drug or medical device by the FDA. This includes a biofeedback machine, acupuncture needles, a cup of herbal tea, massage oil, a glass of vegetable juice or even a bottle of water.

"...if a person decides to produce and sell raw vegetable juice for use in juice therapy to promote optimal health... [and] if the juice therapy is intended for use as part of a disease treatment regimen instead of for the general wellness, the vegetable juice would also be subject to regulation as a drug under the Act."

Translation: Raw vegetable juice will be regulated as a drug and must be FDA approved as a drug if it has any health effect whatsoever. Handing a cup of raw vegetable juice to someone and telling them it's good for the detoxification of their liver will get you arrested for practicing medicine without a license and promoting an "unapproved drug."

..."biologically based practices" includes, but is not limited to, botanicals, animal-derived extracts, vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, amino acids, proteins, prebiotics and probiotics: whole diets, and "functional foods". ...a botanical product intended for use in treating a disease would generally be regulated as a drug." ..."functional foods" may be subject to FDA regulation as foods, dietary supplements, or drugs under the Act.

Translation: All foods, supplements, superfoods and functional foods may be reclassified as drugs by the FDA, then regulated off the market.

If... the manipulative and body-based practices involve the use of equipment (such as massage devices) or the application of a product (such as a lotion, cream, or oil) to the skin or other parts of the body, those products may be subject to regulation under the Act."

Translation: Massage oils and creams will be regulated as "drugs" and acupuncture needles as "medical devices." Taking this absurdity one step further, massage therapists who use their fingers to touch patients may have their fingers regulated as "medical devices" and be accused of practicing medicine for merely touching patients.

Things that will be regulated out of existence
It is very clear that the FDA is intending to regulate and ultimately destroy the entire CAM industry (Complementary and Alternative Medicine). Based on the explanations in the FDA's own document, the following things are likely to occur:

• All vitamins, nutritional supplements and functional foods will be stripped of their structure & function claims, reducing them to empty labels where virtually nothing at all is allowed to be stated.
• Vegetable juice will be regulated as a drug. Raw juice retreats will be raided or shut down.
• Growing and selling common garden herbs will get you arrested as a drug dealer.
• Massage oils and handheld massagers will be regulated as "medical devices."
• Yoga props, pilates machines and weight machines will be regulated as "medical devices" and require FDA approval before being sold or used.
• Raw sprouts and other anti-cancer foods will be regulated as drugs.
• Bottled water that "treats" dehydration will be regulated as a drug.
• Massage therapists who use hot rocks as part of their therapy will have the ROCKS regulated as medical devices! (It's true. The FDA will actually look at a pile of rocks and declare, "Those are medical devices!")
• Functional foods, supplements, vitamins and homeopathic remedies will disappear from store shelves, pending FDA "review." (The only things remaining will be processed junk foods and pharmaceuticals, which is exactly what Big Business wants.)
• Therapeutic tea products, such as green tea, will be outlawed and confiscated.
• Vitamin store owners will be arrested and prosecuted for "practicing medicine without a license."
• Citizens owning personal inventories of "unapproved drugs" (vitamins and herbs) may have their homes raided at gunpoint and their inventories confiscated by armed law enforcement agents.
• The importation of herbs and functional foods from all countries may be banned.

Keep in mind that the FDA is the same agency that:

• Wants to label irradiated foods as "pasteurized."
• Voted to put the deadly drug Vioxx back on the market after tens of thousands of deaths, even after its own manufacurer pulled it from pharmacies.
• Raided a church at gunpoint, confiscating biofeedback machines and charging that they were "practicing medicine" by counseling church members on issues like depression.
• Openly allows corrupt, "on the take" experts to vote on new drug approvals, even when those experts are taking money from the same companies impacted by their votes.
• Refuses to legalize stevia, the safe, natural herbal sweetener that's used virtually everywhere else in the world. The agenda? Protect the profits of aspartame and other chemical sweeteners.
• Openly allows the mass poisoning of the public with cancer-causing food additives such as sodium nitrite.
• Refuses to enforce its own laws regarding unsafe chemical toxins in personal care products, allowing perfume and lotion companies to continue poisoning the public with cancer-causing chemicals that don't even have to be listed on the label, nor proven safe.
• Ordered the destruction of recipe books that mentioned stevia. (A campaign to keep the public ignorant of the herb.)
• Does everything in its power to protect drug company profits, including discrediting herbs, supplements and alternative medicine.

Does anyone honestly believe that this criminal organization has any capacity whatsoever to act in the public interest? Even many Senators are fed up with the FDA's unprecedented level of corruption and criminal behavior.

Action items, continued...
Read Jon Barron's comments on this rule at the JonBarron.org website

Next, lodge your complaint against the FDA by commenting on this docket through the FDA's docket comment form.

And finally, write your Senator or Congressperson about this issue and let them know, in blatant language, that you will not stand by and allow the criminals running medicine today to take away your access to vitamins, supplements, herbs and homeopathic medicine. Write the letter in your own words, even if it's just two sentences. Individual letters have a hundred times the impact of form letters.

Medical wasteland USA
Everything is at stake here. If the FDA gets its way, the United States will become a medical wasteland, dominated by corporate drug company interests, where the naturopaths are imprisoned and their products destroyed. Supplements and herbs will become contraband, and gardeners who grow their own medicinal herbs may be raided and arrested by DEA agents wielding assault rifles. Simply selling dried broccoli sprouts as being "good anti-cancer foods" may land you in prison, and running a vitamin shop could result in you being arrested for "practicing medicine."

Imagine a nation where Whole Foods stores are stripped of all herbs and supplements, where vitamin shops are emptied and abandoned, where books that promote herbs are bulldozed into large piles and burned, where natural healers are rounded up and "disappeared" into incarceration centers. This is the future that will become reality if the FDA has its way. The plan has been explained to us in plain language. Any agency that openly states "vegetable juice will be regulated as a drug" has quite simply lost its marbles. We're are now clearly being regulated by clinically insane bureaucrats.

With this desperate proposal by the FDA -- clearly designed as a last-ditch effort to save the failing conventional medical industry from a massive public shift towards natural medicine -- the war against health freedom has reached our shores, and the FDA is plotting a 9/11-style attack to bring down the towers of health freedom in one swift motion.

This is the same agency that currently represents the greatest threat to the health and safety of the American people, far outweighing the threat of real terrorism. This agency, we have seen, will do ANYTHING to protect the profits and power of drug companies. It will lie, steal, accept bribes, hide scientific evidence, distort statistics, commit scientific fraud, break federal laws, threaten its own drug safety scientists, conspire with drug company executives, intimidate American citizens and use terror-style tactics to achieve its goals of complete domination over foods, drugs and health.

Why do Americans tolerate terrorism in their own government?

It is time we put a stop to this home-grown tyranny. We have fought too hard for freedom in the United States to allow us all to be steamrolled by a criminal front group covertly working for Big Pharma. The FDA has declared war on natural medicine and the American people, and we will lose our family members, children, brothers and sisters as casualties of this war if we don't stand up now and demand radical changes. It's time to stop this terrorist organization from destroying the lives of yet more U.S. citizens.

Make your voice heard now, or forever surrender your access to supplements, herbs, superfoods and functional foods. By the time the FDA is done with this country, we'll all be eating medication for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Action reminders:

1. Lodge a complaint with the FDA by clicking here. MAKE SURE you include the docket number 2006D-0480. But don't trust this to be enough. The FDA will probably simply delete half the complaints it receives, so don't trust your complaint to actually count. It's important to continue...
2. Send a strongly-worded letter to your representatives in Washington. Be sure to cite Docket No. 2006D-0480. Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration. Tell them you support open access to vitamins, herbs, and supplements, and you do not want CAM to be regulated by the FDA.
3. Send this story to everyone you know. Spread the word. Raise the alarm. With enough public support, the FDA will be forced to back off this insane proposal.

And stay tuned to NewsTarget for more news, analysis and action alerts on health freedom. Even though we're under constant attack by criminal organizations trying to disrupt our servers and take us off line, we're still here, beating the drum for health freedom, and hoping that we have enough sane-minded Americans remaining to save this country from its government.

Actual FDA quote is gobbledygook
Here's an actual FDA statement from the CAM Guidance report:

For example, naturopathic cranberry tablets might be labeled for use to maintain the health of the urinary tract. In this example, the cranberry tablets generally would be regulated as "dietary supplements" ...if they were labeled for use to "maintain the health of the urinary tract" rather than "prevent urinary tract infections." The cranberry tablets would be regulated as "drugs" ...if they were labeled for use to "treat urinary tract infections" even if they were labeled as dietary supplements.

Additional phone numbers as listed in the FDA document
Sheryl Lard-Whiteford at 301-827-0379
Daniel Nguyen at 301-827-8971
Ted Stevens at 301-594-1184
Wayne Amchin at 301-827-6739

By Mike Adams, originated from: NewsTarget

Reputation Comments on this post:

very informative read (extensive and kinda long) but good and entertaining

[Nature Boy]

A rather elaborate conspiracy theory by the looks of it. Might be a right airport best seller up there with The Da Vinci Code. A fiction disclaimer would of course have to be on the inside cover, not that half the people who reads this garbage would care to notice. Hype, hype, hype! Always looking for a greater answer than the great answers we already know and can prove. Pissed-off fundamentalist Arabs could never hate us so much that they would pull off the ultimate low-budget mass urban death attack, George Dub-ya must have dunnit!

[Heretic.Ape.]

Being a conspiracy nut is not necessary to see that policy in all matters in in the hands of big business and that it is highly desirable for the pharma industry to destroy competition. And that they have a noxious history of going to morally repugnant lengths to do so.
I don't care about homeopathic remedies and such but I am against the fundamental flaw in our current economic paradigm that literally holds, not by evil scheming design but in its very nature, the inevitable homogenization and subjugation of the human as labor asset and commodity.

[El Calico Loco]

The FDA sucks. What medicines I'm allowed to consume should be up to me, not some Epsilon-moron bureaucrats who've been educated beyond their intelligence (or bought and paid for by Big Pharma).

The decriminalization of recreational drugs is just one part of the war on The War on Drugs. Eliminating the monopoly power of the FDA is another. I'm not opposed to there being an FDA (though this is more properly the domain of individual states, according to the Constitution), but it ought to be an advisory agency rather than an enforcement agency. Consumers are then free to limit themselves to medicines labelled "FDA approved" or not, as they think is best for their health.

Personally, I think a private institute would do the job better. Underwriters Laboratories does a good job certifying the safety of materials and appliances and such. Consumer Report, Clark Howard, and others do a great job taking companies to task when they make crappy products or provide lousy customer service.

They're not perfect, but nothing in this world is. At least these entities have to do well, or they lose the respect of the consumer - and, thus, their income. Government agencies that fail us generally see their budgets increased and their worst morons promoted.


ECL

[Broshious]

Originally Posted by El Calico Loco

The FDA sucks. What medicines I'm allowed to consume should be up to me, not some Epsilon-moron bureaucrats who've been educated beyond their intelligence (or bought and paid for by Big Pharma).

The decriminalization of recreational drugs is just one part of the war on The War on Drugs. Eliminating the monopoly power of the FDA is another. I'm not opposed to there being an FDA (though this is more properly the domain of individual states, according to the Constitution), but it ought to be an advisory agency rather than an enforcement agency. Consumers are then free to limit themselves to medicines labelled "FDA approved" or not, as they think is best for their health.

Personally, I think a private institute would do the job better. Underwriters Laboratories does a good job certifying the safety of materials and appliances and such. Consumer Report, Clark Howard, and others do a great job taking companies to task when they make crappy products or provide lousy customer service.

They're not perfect, but nothing in this world is. At least these entities have to do well, or they lose the respect of the consumer - and, thus, their income. Government agencies that fail us generally see their budgets increased and their worst morons promoted.


ECL

Damn skippy. I did a little reading about Vioxx, that pain med that raised some kind of heart problem rates, and I found a bunch of people saying that they'd still take it because it was the only thing that worked for themm but now they can't because the damn FDA said so.

[FuBai]

There is some merit in this idea. Homeopathy and a great deal of homeopathic medicins work only via a placebo effect, whilst encouraging doubt in mainstream medicine which is damaging to the individual and society. The only religion that is still banned in China is banned because it tells people not to go to the doctor for any problem, but rather to do the religious exercises it suggests, which have only a mild placebo effect. If homeopaths, along with other equally ineffective shamanistic beliefs erode confidence in mainstream medicine, then this is unquestionably a bad thing. How ever it is entirley the wrong reaction to the problem. Public discreditment of homeopathic techniques via the media, publish data that demonstrate how ridiculously low the succes rates and generaly rip into it in the public stage. Banning things makes them seem more attractive and will only give aid to those people who claim the government has anything other than a public spirited agenda against homeopathy.

[robertone]

Originally Posted by FuBai

There is some merit in this idea. Homeopathy and a great deal of homeopathic medicins work only via a placebo effect, whilst encouraging doubt in mainstream medicine which is damaging to the individual and society. The only religion that is still banned in China is banned because it tells people not to go to the doctor for any problem, but rather to do the religious exercises it suggests, which have only a mild placebo effect. If homeopaths, along with other equally ineffective shamanistic beliefs erode confidence in mainstream medicine, then this is unquestionably a bad thing. How ever it is entirley the wrong reaction to the problem. Public discreditment of homeopathic techniques via the media, publish data that demonstrate how ridiculously low the succes rates and generaly rip into it in the public stage. Banning things makes them seem more attractive and will only give aid to those people who claim the government has anything other than a public spirited agenda against homeopathy.

The point is that it doesn't concern 'only' homeopathic medicins, also alternative medicines, nutritional supplements, functional foods and natural therapies are in concern. Besides that, homeopathic medicins aren't that unoperative as [often] suggested. There are even some that are duplicated by the pharmaceutical company -- urticalcin is one of them. An other possitive succes of homeopathic medicins are those against allergic reactions (the apply of the dilluted allergeen in question). Medical research should always be objective in every degree, in practic there are to many commercial interests to be real objective. Think about this; why using health treathening medicins if one knows that depressive feelings can be cured with something simple as magnisiumtautate? Want to know more about the upcoming prohibition? Then search for Codex Alimentaris! And don't be fooled by its apparently gmp (good manufacture practice) prescriptions, read closely. It also bans the use of healthy and fresh food!

[El Calico Loco]

Swim hasn't had much luck with homeopathy, but there was this one time...

He was young and poor and had a sinus infection that wouldn't go away. He went to the cheapest clinic he could find. It had green, dungeon-like walls and a doctor who was at least six hundred years old.

The old sawbones didn't give him any antibiotics. All he did was paint the back of Swim's throat with some sticky yellow goop that tasted really fucking foul. The taste didn't leave his mouth for hours.

But damned if his infection wasn't gone the next day! I wish I knew what that stuff was.

Other than that, homeopathy has been a bust. But he has had good luck with other forms of alternative medicine, on two separate occasions, after mainstream medicine had already failed him.

This isn't meant to push or pull for any particular theory, but only to illustrate that our health choices should belong to us, not nanny-state bureaucrats. Were it up to the AMA and FDA, the successful treatments he received in the past would probably be against the law.


ECL

[Felonious Skunk]

I'm all for printing the exact list of ingredients, components, mixtures, elements, preparations, compounds, extracts, infusions, etc. on the label and letting the consumer come to his own conclusion through personal research and responsibilty about what they are good or not good for.

Which will never happen in Amerika.

[El Calico Loco]

Never is a long time. I think we're nearing the inflection point of this particular sine wave. The next few years will be full of "shock and awe."


ECL

[Heretic.Ape.]

I hope so. "Shock and awe" sounds a great deal better than "shit and apathy"

[Mona Lisa]

It's the drug companies. They want you taking their medications rather than using natural remedies.

[El Calico Loco]

That's a big part of it, these days. Then there's the old-fashioned Yankee puritan belief that we can create the shining city on a hill free of sin and wickedness. Amusing how so many of the proud Southern crackers have so taken their traditional enemies' values to heart. Cycle of domestic abuse...


ECL