The FDA wants jurisdiction over your kitchen!

“Since the FDA only has jurisdiction over compounds involved in ‘interstate commerce,’ they have no jurisdiction over our kitchens—yet. Should my client lose this case, however, the FDA will have set a precedent to invade the privacy of our homes.”

- Attorney Nancy Lord, M.D.

Daniel Smith is between the proverbial “rock and a hard place.” For the last couple of years, he has been selling “MMS Professional,” a high-quality sodium chlorite solution used to purify water. He has also been selling citric acid, a food acid similar to that found in lime or lemon juice.

Daniel also sold books, CDs and DVDs produced by others that explained how mixing sodium chlorite and citric acid produce chlorine dioxide, a chemical commonly used to purify water. Chlorine dioxide also is an effective mouthwash (Compendium of Continuing Education in Dentistry Vol.21, pp. 241-248, 2000).

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U.S. senate votes to maintain big pharma’s monopoly by blocking competitive imports

The United States Senate recently rejected two separate proposals that would have allowed the importation of cheaper medication from other countries, apparently in order to preserve a deal between the pharmaceutical industry and the White House.

The proposals were part of a wider effort to reform the U.S. healthcare system, in large part by cutting unnecessary costs.

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Free Market Health Care and the Poor

One of the disastrous consequences of having adopted the welfare-state way of life is what it has done to the concept of voluntary charity. Let’s look at Medicare and Medicaid, socialist programs that go to the heart of the economic problems facing our nation.

I grew up in Laredo, Texas, in the 1950s, when the U.S. Census Bureau labeled our city as the poorest in the United States on a per-capita income basis. Every day, the office of every doctor in town would be filled with patients, most of whom were extremely poor. While some of them may have been Mexican citizens from Nuevo Laredo, as a practical matter it didn’t really matter because the doctor knew that most of the people in his office couldn’t pay anyway, at least not right away.

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Inventing Disorders

The Psychiatric Drugging of Children

Of all the harmful actions of modern psychiatry, "the mass diagnosing and drugging of children is the most appalling with the most serious consequences for the future of individual lives and for society," warns the world-renowned expert, Dr Peter Breggin, often referred to as the “Conscience of Psychiatry.”

“We’re bringing up a generation in this country in which you either sit down, shut up and do what you're told, or you get diagnosed and drugged," he points out.

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100 Years of US Medical Corporatism

One hundred years ago today, on April 16, 1910, Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation, put the finishing touches on the Flexner Report.[1] No other document would have such a profound effect on American medicine, starting it on its path to destruction up to and beyond the recently passed (and laughably titled) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA), a.k.a., "Obamacare." Flexner can only be accurately understood in the context of what led up to it.

Free-market medicine did not begin in the United States in 1776 with the Revolution. From 1830 to about 1850, licensing laws and regulations imposed during the colonial period and early America were generally repealed or ignored. This was brought about by the increasing acceptance of eclecticism (1813) and homeopathy (1825), against the mainstream medicine (allopathy) of the day that included bloodletting and high-dose injections of metal and metalloid compounds containing mercury or antimony.[2]

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A Non-Political Warning About Health Care

Ultimately, health care is about life and death. And while life and death may lack the gravitas usually accorded to politics, they still matter to most of us.

So, here are the non-political reasons why you really don’t want government health care:

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Wishful Thinking on Health Care

No one knows exactly what was passed.

How an issue is framed is crucial to how it is decided. Advocates of the package of health insurance regulations, taxes, and mandates known as ObamaCare managed to frame the issue as “reform versus the status quo.” But to call the Obama-Pelosi-Reid plan (OPR) “reform” is to beg the question by assuming precisely what needs to be proved: namely, that the legislative package would actually reform — that is, improve — the medical system. Therefore the debate should have been not whether reform is desirable – real reform (improvement) is always desirable — but whether OPR is really reform.

A better framing of the issue would have been: real reform versus the status quo on steroids, for in the end OPR is little more than what Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal calls a “doubling down on the system’s existing perversities.” For example, under OPR everyone will be forced to become a customer of the health insurance industry that the ruling political class just spent a year demonizing, and that industry will reap billions in taxpayer subsidies. Moreover, demand for medical services will be further insulated from true costs. That is already the source of so much of what’s wrong today.

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Obama gives sugar plums to the special interests

“Tonight,” President Obama intoned near midnight Sunday, after the House had passed two health care bills, "we pushed back on the undue influence of special interests. ... We proved that this government -- a government of the people and by the people -- still works for the people."

But even before the president spoke, the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America -- whose $26.1 million lobbying effort in 2009 was the most expensive by any industry lobby in history — hailed the health package as “important and historic.”

The second-biggest industry lobby in America, the American Medical Association, also cheered, as did the American Hospital Association, the No. 5 industry lobby. Throw in the goliath senior lobby AARP and Beltway powerhouse General Electric, and you realize Obama's underdog tale is all bark and no bite.

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Healthcare Intervention: The Bigger Picture

The prospect and reality of Obamacare have woken up many people to the need to stop the socialization of medical care in America. It will produce here what it has produced everywhere: stagnation, overutilization, rationing, and the sacrifice of individual well-being in the name of collective justice.

This is the result not only of every experiment in socialized medicine but of every experiment in socialism generally. The reasons were spelled out by Mises in 1922. He explained that, without property and market prices, economic rationality disappears. The result is unworkable, chaotic, and impoverishing.

Medical socialism is but one variety of a larger problem. But it is one that is particularly devastating to people, because it affects their capacity for staying healthy and alive. By robbing individuals of their rights to exchange and choose, Mises wrote, state-run medical systems are comparable to those run by the army or by prisons, which are not centers of health but of disease and disaster.

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When drug makers’ profits outweigh penalties

Prosecutor Michael Loucks remembers clearly when attorneys for Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, looked across the table and promised it wouldn't break the law again.

It was January 2004, and the lawyers were negotiating in a conference room on the ninth floor of the federal courthouse in Boston, where Loucks was head of the health-care fraud unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. One of Pfizer’s units had been pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug called Neurontin for uses the Food and Drug Administration had never approved.

In the agreement the lawyers eventually hammered out, the Pfizer unit, Warner-Lambert, pleaded guilty to two felony counts of marketing a drug for unapproved uses. New York-based Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in criminal fines and civil penalties, and the company’s lawyers assured Loucks and three other prosecutors that Pfizer and its units would stop promoting drugs for unauthorized purposes.

What Loucks, who was acting U.S. attorney in Boston until November, didn’t know until years later was that Pfizer managers were breaking that pledge not to practice off-label marketing even before the ink was dry on their plea.

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