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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The Regime’s War on Food (Updated, July 25)

Enemies of food fascism: Max Kane (left) and Canadian dairy farmer Michael Schmidt

Many thousands of years ago, two men came across a dairy cow, a beast neither had previously beheld. 

One of them, seeking to impress the other, pointed to the creature’s udder and declared: “You see those things dangling from the underside of that animal? Well, I’m going to squeeze one of them and drink whatever comes out of it!”

According to the late and much-missed George Carlin, that nameless daredevil was the bravest man who ever lived. He was also exceptionally fortunate, since he was able to consume raw milk, and even extol its nutritional benefits, without running the risk of imprisonment.

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If You’re Going to Do Something Illegal in America, Do Something Spectacularly Illegal

If you want to avoid facing a tough prosecution for malfeasance, be a banker, not a biker.

That appears to be the lesson of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, where the lead story was about how Bank of America repeatedly hid its massive bad debt holdings from regulators and investors through a creative accounting device called “repurchase agreements.” A second story just above the fold told how US Food and Drug Administration prosecutors are “Casting a Wider Net” investigating the use of steroids by competitive cyclists.

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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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Raw Milk Crackdown

“They came in the dark, shining bright flashlights while my family was asleep, keeping me from milking my cows, from my family, from breakfast with my family and from our morning devotions, and alarming my children enough so that the first question they asked my wife was, ‘Is Daddy going to jail?’”

That’s how Amish farmer Dan Allgyer described an early morning visit last week from two FDA agents, two U.S. Marshals, and a Pennsylvania state trooper. Apparently, investigating a single farmer for possibly trafficking raw milk across state lines requires a show of force.

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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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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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Pharmaceutical Pillage

Business ethics has become an oxymoron. Wall Street bonuses were up 17 percent to over $20 billion in 2009, the year taxpayers bailed out the financial sector after its meltdown. So, everyone has many reasons to hate the banking and financial sectors that dumped our economy, and the general corruption of American politics by corporate interests. There are good reasons to detest the pharmaceutical industry. Besides raping people with onerous prices for prescription drugs, corporate greed coupled with ineffective government regulation and oversight is actually killing Americans through unsafe drugs.

Enter the newest fiasco, that sweetly named diabetes drug Avandia, so heavenly sounding, yet now revealed to be just another in a long history of drugs that get government approval but turn out to be lethal. According to Bloomberg News: “Safety reviewers at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration urged the agency to take GlaxoSmithKline Plc’s diabetes drug Avandia off the market in 2008 because they said it was causing 500 additional heart attacks per month.” A month! The drug was linked to 304 deaths during the third quarter of 2009, which implies many thousands of deaths to date.

Consider these depressing developments. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have committed acts that forced them to pay the largest criminal fines in American history. In cases involving Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb and four other drug companies, these fines and penalties have totaled over $7 billion since May 2004. That is an amazing number, but in comparison to drug industry profits, merely a pittance.

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A Medical Doctor’s Open Letter Opposing the McCain Sponsored Dietary Supplement Safety Act (DSSA)

Dear Senator McCain:

Though I am a resident of New York, not Arizona, I suggest that someone in your staff reads my letter very carefully as I believe you are unwittingly sponsoring a bill with potentially onerous consequences, one that might if I read the information about it properly, lead to the death of hundreds of my patients fighting advanced, terminal cancer. I do not think, if I am correct in my interpretation, that you would want their death on your conscience.

As some background, I am a registered Republican, and in the past have donated many thousands to Republican causes including your re-election, even when it became clear to me the Party, including you, had strayed significantly from its mission of limited government, deficit reduction, and ultimately, protection of individual liberty. In terms of my professional activities, I am a former journalist (Time Inc), currently a physician and cancer researcher, who educated at three Ivy League schools (Brown undergraduate, Columbia post grad, Cornell for medical school). I finished a fellowship in cancer immunology under Robert A. Good, for ten years President of Sloan-Kettering, and the most published author in the history of medicine. Under Dr. Good’s direction, 29 years ago I began researching the use of diet, nutrients, and proteolytic enzymes against advanced cancer.

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