Herbal Holocaust

[Guest guest]

Herbal Holocaust- http://cannabisculture.com/magazine/cc09/activist/holocaust/

-

 

--

 

HERBAL HOLOCAUST

Underground drug dealers may soon be peddling illicit Vitamin C and other

dietary supplements, including herbs. Police may soon have the authority to

break down your door and search your fridge for health food. Health enthusiasts

could one day be rounded up like prisoners of war and have their homes

confiscated and their livelihood destroyed, like marijuana users and growers.

War on Health

 

In some countries, the War on Health has already begun. In Norway,

Germany, and Australia, Vitamin C and other health supplements are already

illegal in moderate doses, and weak tablets can only be bought over the counter

for, on average, 18 times the price we presently pay here in Canada. Norwegian

vitamin distributor John Hansen reported being chased by undercover agents for

his part in selling Vitamin C above the 200mg limit.1

In South Africa, vitamin distributor Clive Buirski recently had his

shipment of vitamins seized by customs authorities intent on preventing them

from passing into the hands of alternative health practitioners.

In Canada too, the process is well underway. In the past decade, the

Health Protection Branch (HPB) has made over 100 health food supplements

illegal, 23 of which are still available in US stores. One of these " dangerous "

herbal remedies still available in the United States is DHEA, a derivative of

wild yam extract which has been shown to promote longevity and strengthen immune

functioning. With less side-effects than a cup of coffee, DHEA has been a

controlled substance since December 19, 1996, under changes to legislation

suggested by the HPB.2

 

If you say it's good for you, it's a drug

 

The Food and Drug Act defines a " drug " as including any substance " for

use in the diagnosis, treatment, mitigation or prevention of a disease,

disorder, abnormal physical state, or the symptoms thereof, in man or animal. "

This incredibly broad definition can be interpreted to include vitamins like

Vitamin C, used to treat and prevent the disorder of scurvy, plants and herbs

with therapeutic uses like garlic, ginger and peppermint, and even ordinary food

and water, since these act to prevent the abnormal physical states of

dehydration of starvation.

The HPB has decided that once someone claims that a vitamin or herb can

have a therapeutic benefit, it becomes a drug. This means that peppermint and

ginger tea would be considered a drug if the brand name or label suggests that

it could be used as digestive aid.

It's not even necessary for the person selling the herb to make a health

claim for the product. As long as someone, somewhere has claimed that the herb

or vitamin can have a health benefit, it is considered a drug. In fact, some

herbs have been banned from sale by the HPB simply because their names indicate

a possible therapeutic use. Eyebright, cramp bark and feverfew have all been

prohibited for sale in Canada, simply because their names denote their

traditional medicinal use.

Jean-Marc Charron, Chief of the Drug and Environmental Health Inspection

Division of the HPB, warns of the penalties of being caught trying to sell any

of these herbs or vitamins that have been deemed " drugs " by the HPB:

" The penalties for trafficking and possession for the purpose of

trafficking are severe, the length of imprisonment ranging from a term not

exceeding eighteen months on summary conviction, to a term not exceeding ten

years on conviction by indictment. "

 

National Fees and International Treaties

 

Ominously, the banning of herbal supplements is following the same path

that the banning of cannabis did in the thirties.

The contemporary worldwide sanctions against cannabis had their genesis

in the United States' Marijuana Tax Act, passed in 1937, which made the sale of

cannabis prohibitively expensive. This eventually developed into full-scale

prohibition, with international treaties enacted through the United Nations

forcing other member countries to comply. International pressure is one of the

main reasons cannabis is illegal in Canada today.

 

HPB introduces exorbitant fees

In Canada, the process of using exorbitant taxes and fees to eliminate

natural medicines from the market is already in place, under the guise of " cost

recovery " .

Once Health Canada decides that a herb or vitamin is actually a drug,

they require that it receive a " Drug Identification Number " (DIN). Although this

is little more than a bureaucratic procedure which does nothing to guarantee the

safety or efficacy of the substance in question, receiving a DIN is a very

expensive proposition.

A supplier must pay the HPB up to $1600 for testing and approval of each

substance which requires a DIN, plus a one-time fee of $750 and an additional

annual fee of $500 simply for maintaining DIN status. Each supplier of a DIN

product must also pay $4500 for a three day routine inspection for product

compliance.

Each company that manufactures or imports any DIN product must also pay

to have all of its building sites inspected and approved anually. If the

substance is being manufactured in a foreign country, the supplier must pay all

transportation and accomodation costs as well as the inspection fees. Thus it

can easily cost over $4000 to licence an importer's location, and $6000 to

licence a manufacturing lection.

Most companies in the natural health industry carry hundreds of products

from all over the world, meaning that they will soon be approached by a Health

Canada inspector, asking for tens of thousands of dollars in return for

permission to continue selling the herbs and vitamins which they already sell.

These massive taxes will push many natural health stores out of business, and

force the remainder to drastically raise the cost of their vitamins and herbal

medicines.

 

 

 

International Plan to Ban

 

 

While the introduction of new and prohibitive taxes on herbs and

vitamins continues in Canada and other nations around the world, ominous events

are also occuring on the international level.

International treaties like the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

(GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) are going to be used

to coerce countries to conform to worldwide bans on herbal supplements. GATT and

NAFTA are to be used as tools to enforce a set of international standards on

products called " Codex Alimentarius " (Latin for " food code " ).

The Codex was originally created by the World Health Organization as a

set of standards which would be applied internationally, so that consumables

could be shipped from country to country without the problems posed by having

different standards in every nation. It is claimed that Codex is meant only to

be a recommended standard, but GATT and NAFTA both include sections which refer

back to the Codex, making it enforceable by trade sanctions.3

If a country like Canada fails to comply with Codex, it will be

isolated from trade with other " family " countries of GATT and NAFTA, which

accounts for virtually every country on the planet, until it agrees to ban and

restrict the availability of all dietary supplements, including herbs and

vitamins. The threat of trade barriers has traditionally been reserved for

countries with Ñ among other things Ñ lenient drug policies. Consider the recent

trade barriers imposed by the French president Jacques Chirac against Holland.

The incestuous dependence of countries on international trade is being

used to effectively negate a country's internal powers of democracy.

Herbs heal, drugs kill

If vitamins, herbs, and other dietary supplements are being banned or

restricted to protect public health, then it would make sense that such health

foods must pose an equal or greater health risk than the patented pharmaceutical

drugs which are fated to replace them.

Yet vitamins and herbs are the most risk-free treatments in the world.

When released to the general population, herbal treatments for particular

diseases have been shown to be both safer and more effective than their

synthetically produced pharmaceutical counterparts. Examples of the safety and

effectiveness of herbs over dietary supplements include marijuana as a treatment

for glaucoma, horsetail as a treatment for osteoporosis, and saw palmetto as a

treatment for benign prostate enlargement.

Pharmaceutical drug treatments for glaucoma can cause headaches, drug

allergy, metabolic acidosis, rashes, cataracts, hypotension, blood dyscrasia,

kidney stones, and ulcers. Similarly, pharmaceutical solutions to benign

prostate enlargement are approximately 60% less effective than saw palmetto, and

conventional treatments for osteoporosis increases the patient's risk of

developing cancer.

As acclaimed natural health practitioner Zoltan Rona notes, " thousands of

people die each year in North America as a direct result of prescription and

over the counter drugs, [while] the Atlanta Poison Control Centre does not even

track herbal adverse reactions because they are so rare. There have been no

deaths directly attributable to a herb in North America for the past 10 years. "

Even US government studies agree. In 1990, the US Accounting Office

released a Food and Drug Administration " Review of Postapproval Risks

(1976-1985) " , which found that of 198 approved pharmaceutical drugs released for

sale to the public, 102 had serious side effects and had to be either taken off

the market or labeled as dangerous.

Marijuana has been denied to Canadian glaucoma victims since it was banned

by the Narcotics Control Act. Horsetail was banned from health food stores by

the Canadian Health Protection Branch within the last decade. Through the Codex

Alimentarius, the World Health Organization seeks to make other effective herbs,

like saw palmetto, equally unavailable.

 

 

 

 

Pharmacy of Greed

 

Today, the world-wide health market is undergoing a product

repolarization opposed to the interests of big pharmaceutical business. People

are buying fewer pharmaceutical drugs and more health food, vitamins, and herbs.

More money is staying in the local economies of independently owned stores, and

less money is available to fuel the hunger of multinational corporations.

Health food stores are appearing on every corner. World Health

Organization studies show that even in 1985, 80% of the world and 60% of North

Americans used herbs as cures for common ailments on a regular basis.

Worse yet for multinational pharmaceutical interests, health food also

has a tendency to make people sick less often, so the market is shrinking at the

same time as it is repolarizing. If people relied more often on pharmaceutical

cures, the market would be growing rather than shrinking. This is because 8

million people are hospitalized each year for ailments caused by the ingestion

of prescription drugs.4

Originally, Codex threatened to facilitate the movement of the market

away from pharmaceuticals by lowering international standards for natural

products. The lowering of international standards would mean that traditional

healing substances with a proven track record would be subject to even less

scrutiny than they already are. They could be sold without the expensive testing

procedures or licensing imposed on pharmaceuticals. Consequently, they would be

easily available and also cost less than pharmaceuticals. By the law of supply

and demand, they would continue to take more of the market than the drugs

produced by big business.

Is it a coincidence that large pharmaceutical companies have backed a

proposal to make Codex Alimentarius a vehicle for the destruction of the

world-wide health food industry?

 

Old Nazi Chemists & the HPB

 

IG Farben was a German chemical company which, among other things,

produced Zyclon B, the poison gas used in WWII German death camps. They even

operated their own concentration camp during this period, where scientific

experimentation on human subjects were commonplace.5 IG Farben were also the

originators of heroin, methadone and nylon. Their nylon patents were snatched up

by Dupont after the war. Now the progeny of IG Farben threaten the health of all

people, world-wide.

When WWII ended, IG Farben was broken into three subsidiary companies as

a result of the Nuremburg War Trials. These companies are Bayer, BASF, and

Hoescht. At the October, 1996 meeting of Codex, in Bonn, Germany, IG Farben's

subsidiary companies sponsored an amendment to restrict traditionally proven

remedies by subjecting them to the same ineffective and expensive testing

procedures as new pharmaceutical drugs.

The German proposal also included an amendment to ban health food,

vitamins, and herbs from being sold for therapeutic uses, striking a blow at the

very heart of the health-food philosophy. The proposal was accepted, with an

overwhelming majority of the delegates voting in favour of the amendment.

 

 

The German Amendment to Codex

1. No dietary supplement can be sold for preventative or therapeutic use.

Any product making a health claim becomes a registered drug, controlled by the

pharmaceutical industry.

2. No dietary supplement sold as a food can exceed dosage or potency

levels set by the commission. This means that consumer access to dietary

supplements will be limited to the Recommended Daily Amount (RDA) as a maximum

limit for vitamins. Supplements without an RDA would be illegal to sell because

they would all be considered drugs.

3. Codex standards for dietary supplements would become the reference

international standard under GATT, and NAFTA. This means is that Canada and the

US would have no choice but to comply.

4. All new supplements would automatically be banned unless they go

through the Codex approval process.

 

 

 

Canada loves Codex

The Canadian Health Protection Branch, which has been facing extinction

as the result of recent government cutbacks, fully supports the Codex proposals,

which fall directly in line with their own efforts at self-preservation. With

Codex proposals firmly in place, the HPB could gain new life as an enforcement

agency for a whole new class of illegal substances, even while raking in

millions in licensing fees for the few substances they deem " market-worthy " .

The Canadian delegate to Codex, Dr Mary Cheney of the HPB, didn't just

vote for the German amendments to Codex, but went so far as to propose further

restrictive amendments. She proposed a " negative list " which would give Codex

delegates the power to fully prohibit any herb, vitamin, or health food which

they decide is " dangerous " .

It's surprising that there were any votes at all against these

amendments, considering that about 90% of Codex delegates are representatives

from large international pharmaceutical companies. Because of the Bonn

conference, Codex has been transformed into a weapon for the destruction of

health food industries everywhere. International agreements are delivering

democracy firmly into the hands of the corporate elite.

 

Manufacturing Ignorance

 

Since beginning their campaign to inform the public about Codex, John

Hammell, an American health activist, and Zoltan Rona, a Canadian health

activist, have been effectively ignored by an unresponsive media. Speaking

engagements and the internet have been their only available contact points with

the public.

The HPB has been desperately trying to keep Rona's testimony from public

awareness. So far he has been blocked from speaking at medical conferences in

Toronto and Calgary. Similarly, John Hammell, while attempting to cross into

Canada, was red-flagged at customs, and delayed so as to be blocked from

speaking at a public health conference.

 

Government Silence

 

Government officials seem wary of the topic as well. When Codex is

mentioned in the press by government officials it is only mentioned indirectly,

as the " health food issue " , or as the " regulation issue " , buried deep under

other unimportant articles. In an attempt to diffuse the issue before the Ô97

Canadian federal election, the federal government announced that it would form

an " expert panel " to consider the " regulation issue " . The international

implications of Codex were not mentioned in the press release, leaving the

average voter unaware of the real issue.

The likely goal of such tactics is to placate those sections of the

public who know something about Codex, without further spreading the message to

everyone else. As Robert McMaster of the Canadian Coalition for Health Freedom

(CCHF) notes, " there have twice been Ôexpert advisory committees' on herbs, and

every time they met, they made a nice report, and then they did nothing. "

Half-hearted " government commissions " have long been the tool of politicians

seeking to postpone and defuse issues which they plan to do nothing about.

Witness the " comprehensive review " of our drug policy, promised as a consolation

for those opposed to the passage of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

 

 

 

Killing the Source

 

When the Europeans set out to conquer North America, their arsenal

included disease and dependence. Because amerindian tribes were less resistant

to European disease, they died by the millions. Because amerindians became

dependent on goods brought from the New World, they forgot their traditional

ways of life, and were forced into trade. Skins for guns, metal kettles and

knives. The fur trade opened up North America once and for all to European

settlers.

Disease and dependence continue to be the tools by which multinational

corporations enslave the world's populace. By placing themselves between

Canadians and the traditional healing arts, the multinational pharmaceutical

companies ensure that their hold over us remains strong. The gardener and

naturopath, the grower and the shaman, all are outlawed in a society that seeks

to exchange our bond with the earth for a bond of slavery.

With a monopoly on health, the pharmaceutical companies will have the

power to extort the last penny from ailing seniors and sick children, while

those who can't pay will be left to die. Who won't be willing to sell everything

they have to save a loved one from disease? Synthetic cures won't come cheap

when there's no competition or alternative.

A health food store owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, has visions

of a Canada without medicare. " Right now they have plans to pad the system.

Because soon whenever someone wants to get Vitamin C, they will have to go to a

doctor for a prescription. All of those visits will be charged to medicare, and

sooner or later the medicare system will be bankrupt. "

When the medicinally beneficial hemp plant was outlawed, North America

lost a versatile medicine, as well as an efficient means to produce paper,

fabric, and many other items. This resulted in the unchecked cutting of our

forests, and the massive use of pesticides to grow less hardy cotton. When all

herbs are outlawed, and our attachment to the earth is more fundamentally

shaken, what destruction will be unleashed upon the earth then?

Canadians need to learn a lesson from the prohibition of cannabis and

act out against the banning of other healing herbs, before the entire world is

sacrificed to greed.

 

BANNED SUBSTANCES

 

The following herbs are among many considered by the Health Protection

Branch to be harmful substances which may be seized by Customs or wherever they

are sold.

 

a.. American Mandrake, Mayapple

b.. American Mistletoe,

c.. False Mistletoe

d.. American Pennyroyal oil

e.. American Sassafras oil

f.. Autumn Crocus,

g.. Meadow Saffron

h.. Barberry root and its extract

i.. Betel Nut

j.. Bittersweet, Nightshade

k.. Bloodroot

l.. Brazilian Sassafras oil,

m.. Ocotea Cymbarum oil

n.. Calabar Bean

o.. Calamus

p.. Camphor Oil

q.. Cannabis Sativa

r.. Cascara Sagrada

s.. Castor Bean

t.. Catha Edulis

u.. Chaparral

v.. Coltsfoot

w.. Common Celandine

x.. Common Comfrey

y.. Coonties Seeds,

z.. Florida Arrowroot Seeds

aa.. Croton

ab.. Daphne, Mezereum

ac.. Deadly Nightshade

ad.. Devil Pepper

ae.. Dogbane

af.. Ephedra

ag.. Euphorbia, Spurge

ah.. European Mandrake

ai.. European Mistletoe berries

aj.. European Pennyroyal Oil

ak.. Foxglove

al.. Germander

am.. Ginkgo Biloba

an.. Seed and Fruit

ao.. Golden Ragwort

ap.. Gotu Kola

aq.. Hemlock

ar.. Henbane

as.. Kenbane

at.. Horse Chestnut

au.. Jimson Weed, Thornapple

av.. Lantana

aw.. Lily of the Valley

ax.. Lobelia, Indian tobacco

ay.. Micranthrum Oil

az.. Narcissus, Daffodil, Jonquil

ba.. Opium Poppy

bb.. Poison Nut

bc.. Prickley Comfrey

bd.. Ragwort

be.. Red Baneberry

bf.. Red Pokeweed

bg.. Russian Comfrey

bh.. Sage Oil

bi.. Savan Oil

bj.. Senna

bk.. Spanish Arrowroot

bl.. Spreading Dogbane,

bm.. Bitter Root

bn.. Strophanthus

bo.. Tansy Oil

bp.. Thuja, White Cedar

bq.. Tonka Bean

br.. White Bryony

bs.. White Baneberry

bt.. Wormseed

bu.. Yellow Jessamine

bv.. Yohimbe

Over the past decade, the HPB has removed at least the following natural

supplements from Canadian health food stores. They are generally available in

the USA without prescription.

 

 

a.. Pau D'Arco (taheebo)

b.. Arginine

c.. Ornithine

d.. Lysine

e.. Carnitine

f.. Tyrosine

g.. D,L-Phenylalanine

h.. Goldenseal

i.. Tryptophan

j.. Kava Kava

k.. Melatonin

l.. DHEA

m.. Pregnenolone

n.. Stevia

o.. Chromium Picolinate

p.. Germanium

q.. Zinc, Manganese and

r.. anything else picolinate

s.. Vitamin K

t.. Cramp Bark

u.. Boron

v.. Selenomethione

w.. Horsetail

x.. Sodium Oxide Dismutase

 

 

For More Info

 

 

a.. Health Action Network Society, 202 - 5262 Rumble St, Burnaby, BC, V5J

2B6; tel (604) 435-0512; fax (604) 435-1561.

b.. Endangered Products Campaign, tel (604) 435-0512 (Vancouver, BC)

c.. Dr Mary Cheney, Health Canada's delegate to the Codex Commission, tel

(613) 957-0352

d.. \

Footnotes

1. Codex: International Threat to Health Freedom, John Hammell. Essay.

1996.

2. HPB-Codex Connection Kills DHEA, Zoltan P. Rona. Essay. 1997.

3. Will International Harmonization End Health Freedom?, Suzanne Harris.

Essay. 1996.

4. Archives of Internal Medicine, Journal. October 9, 1995.

5. The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben, Joseph Borkin. New York: The

Free Press, 1978.

6. Canadian Health Protection Branch under fire, Laura Eggertson. Article

in The Globe and Mail, May 30, 1997.